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Category: US Military

  • US Militarism’s Toxic Impact On Climate Policy

    President Biden addressed the UN General on September 21 with a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return,” and a promise that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power but, God willing, with the power of our example,” he said.

    But the U.S. is not a leader when it comes to saving our planet. Yahoo News recently published a report titled “Why the U.S. Lags Behind Europe on Climate Goals by 10 or 15 years.” The article was a rare acknowledgment in the U.S. corporate media that the United States has not only failed to lead the world on the climate crisis, but has actually been the main culprit blocking timely collective action to head off a global existential crisis.

    The post US Militarism’s Toxic Impact On Climate Policy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Freedom from Fear: Stop Playing the Government’s Mind Games

    No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

    — Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

    America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

    The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

    Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

    This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live and the constantly shifting crises that keep the populace in a state of high alert.

    Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.

    We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of a virus, fear of the unmasked, fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government. The list goes on and on.

    The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

    Fear makes people stupid.

    Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

    Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

    This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.

    This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology, endless wars, COVID-19 mandates, etc., hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.

    All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

    Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police, marauding SWAT teams, and egregious assaults on the rights of the citizenry.

    America has already entered a new phase, one in which communities are locked down, employees are forced to choose between keeping their jobs or exercising their freedoms, children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents, and law-abiding Americans are finding their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented and their communications monitored.

    These threats are not to be underestimated.

    Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.

    Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.

    So far, these tactics are working.

    An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America.

    Each successive crisis in recent years (a COVID-19 pandemic, terrorism, etc.)—manufactured or legitimate—has succeeded in reducing the American people to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”

    Sanchez continues:

    I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…

    I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…

    Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.

    As history makes clear, fear leads to fascistic, totalitarian regimes.

    It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

    A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

    The following are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:

    ·       The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).

    ·       The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.

    ·       The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.

    ·       The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.

    ·       The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.

    ·       The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.

    ·       The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.

    ·       The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.

    ·       The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.

    ·       The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.

    The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.

    “Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized,” writes Jeffrey Tucker. “Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect.”

    For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.

    Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring.

    It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences.

    For example, neuroscientists have observed how quickly fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports:

    In the experiment, researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell. Yet when the critters caught a whiff of it for the first time, they suddenly became anxious and fearful. They were even born with more cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their noses and more brain space devoted to cherry-blossom-smelling.

    The conclusion? “A newborn mouse pup, seemingly innocent to the workings of the world, may actually harbor generations’ worth of information passed down by its ancestors.”

    Now consider the ramifications of inherited generations of fears and experiences on human beings. As the Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear, trauma and compliance can be passed down through the generations.

    Fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it now operates in our contemporary world—all of which raises fundamental questions about us as human beings and what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

    In the words of psychologist Erich Fromm:

    [C]an human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love—that is to say, can man forget he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one?

    The post Freedom from Fear: Stop Playing the Government’s Mind Games first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US “Era of War Over”?

    It’s nice to hear President Joe Biden saying that the US “era of relentless war is over”. But “nice” doesn’t mean “credible”. Indeed, the probable chances are that Biden’s words are sugary, hollow and disingenuous. Sentimental candy-floss.  © REUTERS / Eduardo Munoz

    So hold on to the ticker-tape celebrations and champagne toasting a new era of world peace.

    When Biden addressed the annual United Nations General Assembly this week he was giving the usual spiel that we have come to expect from US presidents at the podium. Rosy, florid platitudes, full of self-congratulation and presumed American virtue. But, ultimately, as usual, it is a feat of US duplicity and hypocrisy meant to hoodwink the rest of the world from the reality of Washington’s systematic warmongering.

    I stand here today, the first time in 20 years the United States is not at war. We’ve turned the page… We close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.

    That feel-good soundbite is shot through with lies and deception. Biden is referring to the forced retreat of US military after its defeat in Afghanistan – America’s longest war. Biden makes it sound as if it was some kind of honorable end of hostilities. When the reality is the US was beaten and mired in war debt.

    The United States invaded Afghanistan in criminal aggression under the false pretext of “fighting terrorism”. Its forces should never have been in the Central Asian country in the first place. Now it is ruled by Taliban militants whom the US ousted two decades ago. Talk about a futile waste of millions of lives, and trillions of dollars. Biden has the gall to make the retreat from Afghanistan sound as if it is noble.

    US soldiers stand guard behind barbed wire as Afghans sit on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on August 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan. © AFP 2021 / Wakil Kohsar

    The first time in 20 years the United States is not at war, declares Biden. That’s a barefaced lie. US troops are illegally occupying parts of Syria denying that nation access to its oil fields. The US is carrying out airstrikes in Syria, Iraq and Somalia.

    The Biden administration, like his predecessors, is plying an anti-Russian regime in Kiev with billions of weapons to wage a civil war against the ethnic Russian people of Eastern Ukraine. That war has been festering for more than seven years and runs the risk of escalating into a confrontation between the US-led NATO alliance and Russia.

    President Biden referred to the foundation of the United Nations in 1945 following the Second World War – the greatest conflagration in human history with an estimated death toll of nearly 75 million, most of the victims being Soviet and Chinese citizens.

    What’s he talking about? In every decade since the Second World War, the United States has been involved in one or more major armed conflicts, from Korea to Vietnam, from Latin America to Africa and the Middle East.

    The ostensible end of the war in Afghanistan is but a punctuation mark in an ongoing history of American wars of aggression against the rest of the planet. This is about turning the page all right… to the next US war.

    That’s because the US is an imperial power that relies on coercion, force, and ultimately violence in order to assert its writ over other nations. Imperialism was at the root of the First and Second World Wars. Why would we expect that kind of power to stop waging wars?

    Biden’s rhetoric at the UN is the euphemism of a crime boss. He talks about “working together” and how we should “redouble our diplomacy” to “end conflicts”. He says the United States is not “seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs”.

    This pious bluster came only days after Biden announced a new military alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom – AUKUS – which will supply nuclear-powered submarines to Australia for the purpose of ramping up Washington’s hostility towards China and Russia.

    US policy is essentially about polarizing and dividing the world into hostile camps in order to bestow hegemonic control. American capitalist power and its addiction to militarism is all about driving conflicts and war.

    Biden’s soundbite about the world being at “an inflection point”, facing a “decisive decade” is half-right. But not in the sense he means of US leadership. We are facing another build-up to more US war, this time against China and Russia. The only way out of this dead-end is for people around the world, including the American people, to realize the lies and duplicity they are being sold by US and Western misleaders.

    • First published in Sputnik News

    The post US “Era of War Over”? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. Militarism’s Toxic Impact on Climate Policy

    LONDON, ENGLAND: Protesters hold signs at the YouthStrike4Climate student march on April 12, 2019 in London, United Kingdom. Students are protesting across the UK due to the lack of government action to combat climate change. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

    President Biden addressed the UN General Assembly on September 21 with a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return,” and a promise that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power but, God willing, with the power of our example,” he said.

    But the U.S. is not a leader when it comes to saving our planet. Yahoo News recently published a report titled “Why the U.S. Lags Behind Europe on Climate Goals by 10 or 15 years.”  The article was a rare acknowledgment in the U.S. corporate media that the United States has not only failed to lead the world on the climate crisis, but has actually been the main culprit blocking timely collective action to head off a global existential crisis.

    The anniversary of September 11th and the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan should be ringing alarm bells inside the head of every American, warning us that we have allowed our government to spend trillions of dollars waging war, chasing shadows, selling arms and fueling conflict all over the world, while ignoring real existential dangers to our civilization and all of humanity.

    The world’s youth are dismayed by their parents’ failures to tackle the climate crisis.  A new survey of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 in ten countries around the world found that many of them think humanity is doomed and that they have no future.

    Three-quarters of the young people surveyed said they are afraid of what the future will bring, and 40% say the crisis makes them hesitant to have children. They are also frightened, confused and angered by the failure of governments to respond to the crisis. As the BBC reported, “They feel betrayed, ignored and abandoned by politicians and adults.”

    Young people in the U.S. have even more reason to feel betrayed than their European counterparts. America lags far behind Europe on renewable energy. European countries started fulfilling their climate commitments under the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s and now get 40% of their electricity from renewable sources, while renewables provide only 20% of electric power in America.

    Since 1990, the baseline year for emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, Europe has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 24%, while the United States has failed to cut them at all, spewing out 2% more than it did in 1990. In 2019, before the Covid pandemic, the United States produced more oil and more natural gas than ever before in its history.

    NATO, our politicians and the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic promote the idea that the United States and Europe share a common “Western” culture and values. But our very different lifestyles, priorities and responses to this climate crisis tell a tale of two very different, even divergent economic and political systems.

    The idea that human activity is responsible for climate change was understood decades ago and is not controversial in Europe. But in America, politicians and news media have blindly or cynically parroted fraudulent, self-serving disinformation campaigns by ExxonMobil and other vested interests.

    While the Democrats have been better at “listening to the scientists,” let’s not forget that, while Europe was replacing fossil fuels and nuclear plants with renewable energy, the Obama administration was unleashing a fracking boom to switch from coal-fired power plants to new plants running on fracked gas.

    Why is the U.S. so far behind Europe when it comes to addressing global warming? Why do only 60% of Europeans own cars, compared with 90% of Americans? And why does each U.S. car owner clock double the mileage that European drivers do? Why does the United States not have modern, energy-efficient, widely-accessible public transportation, as Europe does?

    We can ask similar questions about other stark differences between the United States and Europe. On poverty, inequality, healthcare, education and social insurance, why is the United States an outlier from what are considered societal norms in other wealthy countries?

    One answer is the enormous amount of money the U.S spends on militarism. Since 2001, the United States has allocated $15 trillion (in FY2022 dollars) to its military budget, outspending its 20 closest military competitors combined.

    The U.S. spends far more of its GDP (the total value of goods produced and services) on the military than any of the other 29 Nato countries—3.7% in 2020 compared to 1.77%. And while the U.S. has been putting intense pressure on NATO countries to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, only ten of them have done so. Unlike in the U.S., the military establishment in Europe has to contend with significant opposition from liberal politicians and a more educated and mobilized public.

    From the lack of universal healthcare to levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in other wealthy countries, our government’s under-investment in everything else is the inevitable result of these skewed priorities, which leave America struggling to get by on what is left over after the U.S. military bureaucracy has raked off the lion’s share – or should we say the “generals’ share”? – of the available resources.

    Federal infrastructure and “social” spending in 2021 amount to only about 30% of the money spent on militarism. The infrastructure package that Congress is debating is desperately needed, but the $3.5 trillion is spread over 10 years and is not enough.

    On climate change, the infrastructure bill includes only $10 billion per year for conversion to green energy, an important but small step that will not reverse our current course toward a catastrophic future. Investments in a Green New Deal must be bookended by corresponding reductions in the military budget if we are to correct our government’s perverted and destructive priorities in any lasting way. This means standing up to the weapons industry and military contractors, which the Biden administration has so far failed to do.

    The reality of America’s 20-year arms race with itself makes complete nonsense of the administration’s claims that the recent arms build-up by China now requires the U.S. to spend even more. China spends only a third of what the U.S. spends, and what is driving China’s increased military spending is its need to defend itself against the ever-growing U.S. war machine that has been “pivoting” to the waters, skies and islands surrounding its shores since the Obama administration.

    Biden told the UN General Assembly that “..as we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.” But his exclusive new military alliance with the U.K. and Australia, and his request for a further increase in military spending to escalate a dangerous arms race with China that the United States started in the first place, reveal just how far Biden has to go to live up to his own rhetoric, on diplomacy as well as on climate change.

    The United States must go to the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow in November ready to sign on to the kind of radical steps that the UN and less developed countries are calling for. It must make a real commitment to leaving fossil fuels in the ground; quickly convert to a net-zero renewable energy economy; and help developing countries to do the same. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres says, the summit in Glasgow “must be the turning point” in the climate crisis.

    That will require the United States to seriously reduce the military budget and commit to peaceful, practical diplomacy with China and Russia. Genuinely moving on from our self-inflicted military failures and the militarism that led to them would free up the U.S. to enact programs that address the real existential crisis our planet faces – a crisis against which warships, bombs and missiles are worse than useless.

    The post U.S. Militarism’s Toxic Impact on Climate Policy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Nuclear White Elephants: Australia’s New Submarine Deal

    It does not get any messier or more chaotic than this.  Since 2009, when Australia’s Future Submarine Program (FSP) known as Project SEA 1000, began to take shape, strategists and policy makers have been keen to pursue the next big White Elephant of defence spending.  And few areas of an already wasteful area of public expenditure are more costly – often mindlessly so – than submarines.

    The Australian effort here is particularly impressive.  Pick a real winner by signing a contract for a yet to be designed attack class submarine, supposedly necessary in an increasingly dangerous region.  Ensure that this design is based on a nuclear model and remove that attribute, aptly described as “dumbing down a nuclear submarine by removing the whole basis of its superior capability, and then charging at least twice as much for a far less capable submarine.”

    Just to make things interesting, make sure the order is for 12 of these yet to be designed and built creatures.  Make sure, as well, that they are only ready sometime in the 2030s, by which time they risk being obsolete in a field of other contending submarines with superior capabilities.

    The dubious honour for this monumentally foolish contract, with an initial cost of AU$50 billion, fell to the French submarine company DCNS (now called Naval Group). It nudged out German and Japanese contenders with pre-existing designs.  “The decision,” a government announcement in April 2016 explained, “was driven by DCNS’s ability to best meet all of the Australian Government requirements.  These included superior sensor performance and stealth characteristics, as well as range and endurance similar to the Collins class submarine.  The Government’s considerations also included cost, schedule, program execution, through-life support and Australian industry involvement.”

    The contract warmed the French military establishment.  It was praised as the “contract of the century”.  Le Parisien’s editorial lauded the prospect of thousands of jobs.  President François Hollande could say that he was also capable of pulling off a contract to aid the French military industrial complex, despite being a socialist.  A “50-year marriage”, claimed French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian with honeymoon exuberance, had begun.

    The post-nuptials were not promising.  Rear Admiral Greg Sammut had to concede in an estimates hearing before Australian senators that another AU$50 billion would be required to sustain the submarines for the duration of their operating life.  “Many of the detailed costs of acquisition and sustainment will be determined during the design process through choices made but at this point early estimation of the sustainment costs for the fleet are of the order of up to $50 billion on a constant price basis.”

    Tiffs and disagreements over distribution of labour and further costs started to bite.  How much of the work would actually be undertaken by labour based in Australia?  Would the French company be keeping the lion’s share?  With such problems, and the pace of development, another idea started to gain momentum in the halls of defence: a competing, cheaper design, based on a rejigged version of Australia’s existing Collins Class submarine, might be a suitable alternative.  In the meantime, perhaps a German alternative might also figure, namely the Type 214 diesel electric submarine developed by Howaldtswerker-Deutsche Werft GmbH (HDW).

    In May, Naval Group’s Transfer of Technology program manager Fabrice Leduc solemnly told his staff that the submarine project had been subjected to a “political timeline” following a change of minister in the Australian Defence portfolio.  The new occupant, Peter Dutton, was biding his time because “he wanted to have some strong warranties from the industry and especially Naval Group in terms of cost and schedule.”  The marriage had truly soured.

    On September 15, the press gallery in Canberra was awash with rumours that a divorce was being proposed.  In the early hours of the following day, the question as to whether Australia would be dissolving its union with Naval Group was answered. In place of that union would be a ménage à trois with the United States and United Kingdom, a security three-way with Australia as the subordinate partner.  The glue that will hold this union together is a common suspicion: China.  In place of the Attack Class submarine: a nuclear powered alternative with Anglo-American blessing, based on the US Virginia class or UK Astute class.

    In their joint statement announcing the creation of AUKUS, a name deserving a place in a science fiction glossary, the joint leaders of the three countries “guided” by their “enduring ideals and shared commitment to the international rules-based order” had resolved “to deepen diplomatic, security, and defence cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region, including by working with partners, to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.”  AUKUS would be a new “enhanced trilateral security partnership” to further such goals.

    The agreement is nothing less than an announcement to powers in the region that the Anglophone bloc intends to police, oversee and, if necessary, punish.  The three countries will “promote deeper information and technology.”  Security, science relating to defence, technology, industrial bases and supply chains will be further integrated.  Deeper cooperation would take place “on a range of security and defence capabilities.”

    The first initiative of the agreement stands out: “we commit to a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”  Expertise to “bring an Australian capability into service at the earliest achievable date” from the submarine programs of both the US and the UK would be drawn on.  AUKUS unmistakably ties the countries into the same security orbit, meshing them to principles of “interoperability, commonality, and mutual benefit.”

    Australia’s submarine policy has previously eschewed nuclear propulsion. Now, as a dowry for receiving such largesse, Canberra is offering up Australia as a confirmed US asset in policing the Indo-Pacific. In any conflict situation, the wallahs of the antipodes are unlikely to say no to any request to do battle with the Middle Kingdom.  US Navy commanders will also be smacking their lips at maintaining attack vessels in Australia as part of the arrangement.

    In the meantime, neighbours will be troubled, despite assurances that the vessels will only have a conventional weapons capability.  Nearby Indonesia is unlikely to be glowing in admiration.

    The dissolution of the union with Naval Group will also be costly, with the defence company bound to push for a generous compensation package.  (AU$400 million is a suggested figure, though this is unlikely to satisfy either Naval Group or the Parisian overlords)  To this can be added AU$2 billion already spent.

    As the divorce costs are sorted, some Australian politicians have pledged to make dissenting noises, with the Greens leader Adam Bandt already warning that the decision promised to “put floating Chernobyls in the heart of Australia’s cities.”  Protests from anti-nuclear activists and advocates are in the offing.

    Then arises that enduring problem of actually building these naval beasts.  US lawmakers will be rooting for the construction of the submarines on home soil, a situation which promises to mirror the headaches caused by the Naval Group contract.  Australia also lacks a shipyard able to build or maintain such vessels.

    In playing its part in the creation of AUKUS, Canberra has exchanged one white elephant of the sea for another.  But in doing so, Australia has done so in manner more threatening, and more significant, than anything associated with the Naval Group Contract.  The small space Australian diplomats might have had in keeping Canberra out of any foolish conflict in the Indo-Pacific has become miniscule.  The war mongers will be dewily ecstatic.

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  • Despite its exit, the US will continue to wage war on Afghanistan

    The United States has always been a bad loser. Whether it has viewed itself as an imperial power, a military superpower or, in today’s preferred terminology, the “world’s policeman”, the assumption is that everyone else must submit to its will.

    All of which is the context for judging the outcry in western capitals over the US army’s hurried exit last month from Kabul, its final hold-out in Afghanistan.

    There are lots of voices on both sides of the Atlantic lamenting that messy evacuation. And it is hard not to hear in them – even after a catastrophic and entirely futile two-decade military occupation of Afghanistan – a longing for some kind of re-engagement.

    Politicians are describing the pull-out as a “defeat” and bewailing it as evidence that the US is a declining power. Others are warning that Afghanistan will become a sanctuary for Islamic extremism, leading to a rise in global terrorism.

    Liberals, meanwhile, are anxious about a renewed assault on women’s rights under the Taliban, or they are demanding that more Afghans be helped to flee.

    The subtext is that western powers need to meddle a little – or maybe a lot – more and longer in Afghanistan. The situation, it is implied, can still be fixed, or at the very least the Taliban can be punished as a warning to others not to follow in its footsteps.

    All of this ignores the fact that the so-called “war for Afghanistan” was lost long ago. “Defeat” did not occur at Kabul airport. The evacuation was a very belated recognition that the US military had no reason, not even the purported one, to be in Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden evaded capture.

    In fact, as experts on the region have pointed out, the US defeated itself. Once al-Qaeda had fled Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s chastened fighters had slunk back to their villages with no appetite to take on the US Robocop, each local warlord or tribal leader seized the moment. They settled scores with enemies by informing on them, identifying to the US their rivals as  “terrorists” or Taliban.

    US commanders blew ever bigger holes through the new Pax Americana as their indiscriminate drone strikes killed friend and foe alike. Soon most Afghans outside the corrupt Kabul elite had good reason to hate the US and want it gone. It was the Pentagon that brought the Taliban back from the dead.

    Deceitful spin

    But it was not just the Afghan elite that was corrupt. The country became a bottomless pit, with Kabul at its centre, into which US and British taxpayers poured endless money that enriched the war industries, from defence officials and arms manufacturers to mercenaries and private contractors.

    Those 20 years produced a vigorous, powerful Afghanistan lobby in the heart of Washington that had every incentive to perpetuate the bogus narrative of a “winnable war”.

    The lobby understood that their enrichment was best sold under the pretence – once again – of humanitarianism: that the caring West was obligated to bring democracy to Afghanistan.

    That deceitful spin, currently being given full throat by politicians, is not just there to rationalise the past. It will shape the future, too, in yet more disastrous ways for Afghanistan.

    With American boots no longer officially on the ground, pressure is already building for war by other means.

    It should not be a difficult sell. After all, that was the faulty lesson learned by the Washington foreign policy elite after US troops found themselves greeted in Iraq, not by rice and rose petals, but by roadside bombs.

    In subsequent Middle East wars, in Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US has preferred to fight more covertly, from a greater distance or through proxies. The advantage is no American body bags and no democratic oversight. Everything happens in the shadows.

    There is already a clamour in the Pentagon, in think tanks, among arms manufacturers and defence contractors, and in the US media, too, to do exactly the same now in Afghanistan.

    Nothing could be more foolhardy.

    Brink of collapse

    Indeed, the US has already begun waging war on the Taliban and – because the group is now Afghanistan’s effective government – on an entire country under Taliban rule. The war is being conducted through global financial institutions, and may soon be given a formal makeover as a “sanctions regime”.

    The US did exactly the same to Vietnam for 20 years following its defeat there in 1975. And more recently Washington has used that same blueprint on states that refuse to live under its thumb, from Iran to Venezuela.

    Washington has frozen at least $9.5bn of Afghanistan’s assets in what amounts to an act of international piracy. Donors from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to the European Union, Britain and the US are withholding development funds and assistance. Most Afghan banks are shuttered. Money is in very short supply.

    Afghanistan is already in the grip of drought, and existing food shortages are likely to intensify during the winter into famine. Last week a UN report warned that, without urgent financial help, 97 percent of Afghans could soon be plunged into poverty.

    All of this compounds Afghanistan’s troubles under the US occupation, when the number of Afghans in poverty doubled and child malnutrition became rampant. According to Ashok Swain, Unesco’s chair on international water cooperation, “more than one-third of Afghans have no food, half no drinking water, two-thirds no electricity”.

    That is an indictment of US misrule over the past two decades when, it might have been assumed, at least some of the $2tn spent on Afghanistan had gone towards Washington’s much-vaunted “nation-building” project rather than guns and gunships.

    Now Afghans’ dire plight can be used as a launchpad for the US to cripple the Taliban as it struggles to rebuild a hollowed-out country.

    The real aspiration of sanctions will be to engineer Afghanistan’s economic collapse – as an exemplar to others of US power and reach, and vindictiveness, and in the hope that the Afghan people can be starved to the point at which they rise up against their leaders.

    Deepen existing splits

    All of this can easily be framed in humanitarian terms, as it has been elsewhere. Late last month, the US drove through the United Nations Security Council a resolution calling for free travel through Kabul airport, guarantees on human rights, and assurances that the country will not become a shelter for terrorism.

    Any of those demands can be turned into a pretext to extend sanctions to the Afghan government itself. Governments, including Britain’s, are already reported to be struggling to find ways to approve charities directing aid to Afghanistan.

    But it is the sanctions themselves that will cause humanitarian suffering. Unpaid teachers mean no school for children, especially girls. No funds for rural clinics will result in more women dying in childbirth and higher infant mortality rates. Closed banks end in those with guns – men – terrorising everyone else over limited resources.

    Isolating the Taliban with sanctions will have two entirely predictable outcomes.

    First, it will push the country into the arms of China, which will be well-positioned to assist Afghanistan in return for access to its mineral wealth. Beijing has already announced plans to do business with the Taliban that include reopening the Mes Aynak copper mine.

    As US President Joe Biden’s administration is already well-advanced in crafting China as the new global menace, trying to curtail its influence on neighbours, any alliance between the Taliban and China could easily provide further grounds for the US intensifying sanctions.

    Secondly, sanctions are also certain to deepen existing splits within the Taliban, between the hardliners in the north and east opposed to engagement with the West, and those in the south keen to win over the international community in a bid to legitimise Taliban rule.

    At the moment, the Taliban doves are probably in the ascendant, ready to help the US root out internal enemies such as the ISKP, Islamic State group’s offshoot in Afghanistan. But that could quickly change if Washington reverts to type.

    A combination of sanctions, clumsy covert operations and Washington overplaying its hand could quickly drive the hardliners into power, or into an alliance with the local IS faction.

    That scenario may have already been given a boost by a US drone strike on Kabul in late August, in retaliation for an ISKP attack on the airport that killed 13 US soldiers. New witness testimonies suggest the strike killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, not Islamic militants.

    Familiar game plan

    If that weren’t bad enough, Washington hawks are calling for the Taliban to be officially designated a “foreign terrorist organisation“, and the new Afghan government a state sponsor of terrorism, which would make it all but impossible for the Biden administration to engage with it. Others such as Lindsey Graham, an influential US politician, are trying to pile on the pressure by calling for troops to return.

    How readily this mindset could become the Washington consensus is highlighted by US media reports of plans by the CIA to operate covertly within Afghanistan. As if nothing has been learned, the agency appears to be hoping to cultivate opponents of the Taliban, including once again the warlords whose lawlessness brought the Taliban to power more than two decades ago.

    This is a game plan the US and Britain know well from their training and arming of the mujahideen to oust the Soviet army from Afghanistan in the 1980s and overthrow a few years later Afghanistan’s secular communist government.

    Biden will have an added incentive to keep meddling in Afghanistan to prevent any attacks originating from there that could be exploited by his political opponents and blamed on his pulling out troops.

    According to the New York Times, the CIA believes it must be ready to “counter threats” likely to emerge from a “chaos” the Taliban will supposedly unleash.

    But Afghanistan will be far less chaotic if the Taliban are strong, not if – as is being proposed – the US undermines Taliban cohesion by operating spies in its midst, subverts the Taliban’s authority by launching drone strikes from neighbouring countries, and recruits warlords or sponsors rival Islamic groups to keep the Taliban under pressure.

    William J Burns, the CIA’s director, has said the agency is ready to run operations “over the horizon“, – at arm’s length. The New York Times has reported that US officials predict “Afghan opponents of the Taliban will most likely emerge who will want to help and provide information to the United States”.

    This strategy will lead to a failed state, one immiserated by US sanctions and divided between warlords feuding over the few resources left. That is precisely the soil in which the worst kind of Islamic extremism will flourish.

    Destabilising Afghanistan is what got the US into this mess in the first place. Washington seems only too ready to begin that process all over again.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Despite its exit, the US will continue to wage war on Afghanistan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Second Afghan War And US Retreat From Central Asia

    There were actually two Afghan wars. The first began within a few weeks of the 9-11 tragedy, when the US was attacked by Al Qaeda with the assistance of elements of the Saudi Arabia ruling elite.

    In the first war US forces invaded Afghanistan behind the excuse its mission and goal was to capture Bin Laden and deny Al Qaeda a base in that country, even though there is ample evidence the Taliban had offered to kick Bin Laden out in exchange for no US invasion. The Bush administration rejected the Taliban offer because its actual mission and objective was always greater than just capturing Bin Laden, or even occupying Afghanistan.

    The first Afghan war was over in a matter of a few months, when US forces drove the Taliban out of government in Afghanistan and into the countryside while sending forces of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda retreating into the mountains bordering Pakistan

    The post The Second Afghan War And US Retreat From Central Asia appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • To Counter Terror, Abolish War

    On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.

    Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center,  U.S. Mission to the UN officials called us and asked that we visit with them.

    I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.

    The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the U.S. now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes, and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.

    I visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend whom I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account, shortly before I arrived, about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.

    My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.

    In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”

    For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.

    When the U.S. was winding down its troop surge in 2014, but not its occupation,  military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant, a step which could prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment, would be 5 cents per child per year.

    Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?

    One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.

    The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.

    In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.

    It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.

    Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.

    In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and  three million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?

    On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.

    We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the U.S. helped create.

    Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.

    My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.

    Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage which says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”

    Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need U.S. people to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today.

    Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree:  To counter terror, abolish war.

    • This article first appeared at Waging Nonviolence

    The post To Counter Terror, Abolish War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Following Afghanistan Defeat: Can EU Win Own ‘Independence’ from the US?

    Suddenly, the idea put forth by French President, Emmanuel Macron, late last year does not seem so far-fetched or untenable after all. Following the US-NATO hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan, European countries are now forced to consider the once unthinkable:  a gradual dismantling from US dominance.

    When, on September 29, 2020, Macron uttered these words: “We, some countries more than others, gave up on our strategic independence by depending too much on American weapons systems”, the context of this statement had little to do with Afghanistan. Instead, Europe was angry at the bullying tactics used by former US President Donald Trump and sought alternatives to US leadership. The latter has treated NATO – actually, all of Europe – with such disdain, that it has forced America’s closest allies to rethink their foreign policy outlook and global military strategy altogether.

    Even the advent of US President Joe Biden and his assurances to Europe that “America is back” did little to reassure European countries, which fear, justifiably, that US political instability may exist long after Biden’s term in office expires.

    The chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan – without NATO members even being consulted or considered as the US signed and enacted a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban starting in July 2020 – has convinced Europe that, despite the defeat of Trump, Washington has essentially remained the same: a self-centered ‘ally’.

    Now that the US and NATO have officially left Afghanistan, a political debate in Europe is raging on many political platforms. The strongest indicators that Europe is ready to proceed with an independent foreign policy agenda and European-centered military strategy became evident in the EU Defense Ministers’ meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

    In a position that is increasingly representing a wider EU stance, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles, articulated the Bloc’s prevailing sentiment: “The experience from Afghanistan has shown that our inability to respond comes at a price. The EU must therefore strengthen its strategic autonomy by creating the first entry force capable of ensuring stability in the EU’s neighborhood.”

    Despite assurances that this ‘first entry force’ will not represent an alternative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but rather ‘complement’ its role, chances are this new army will serve as a stepping stone for Europe’s coveted independence from the US foreign policy agenda.

    Just marvel at these statements by top European, including British, officials and analysts to appreciate the crisis underway in NATO. Remember that 51 NATO members and partner countries had rushed to aid the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, following the invocation of the common-defense clause, Article 5.

    “Nobody asked us whether it was a good idea to leave that country in such … a way,” Johann Wadephul, a deputy caucus leader for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said, with reference to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the absence of any coordination with Washington’s NATO allies.

    Former British Prime Minister, Theresa May, questioned everything, including Europe’s blind allegiance to the US: “Was our intelligence really so poor? Was our understanding of the Afghan government so weak? Was our knowledge on the ground so inadequate? Or did we just think we had to follow the United States and on a wing and a prayer it would be all right on the night?”

    Katharina Emschermann, the deputy director of the reputable Berlin-based Center for International Security at the Hertie School, seemed to speak for many European analysts when she said: “Part of the discord that we’re seeing now is probably also rooted in the sense of unease about how things are going to go on in the future.”

    This ‘unease’ refers to Europe’s traditional foreign policy, which has been hostage to post-WWII Trans-Atlantic European American partnership. However, Europe itself is changing, together with the world around it. Moreover, the Chinese economy has grown tremendously in recent years. As of last year, it was Beijing, not Washington, that served the critical role of being the EU’s largest trade partner.

    Not only has Chinese economic – thus, political and military – clout grown exponentially, Europe’s share of the global economy has shrunk significantly, and not only because of the Brexit ordeal. According to NBC news, citing the British accounting firm PwC, “in 1960, the countries that would form the E.U. made up a third of the global economy. By 2050, the bloc is projected to account for just 9 percent”.

    The growing realization among European countries that they must engineer an eventual break-up from the US is rooted in legitimate fears that the EU’s interest is hardly a top American priority. Hence, many European countries continue to resist Washington’s ultimatums regarding China.

    It was also Macron, while elaborating on the concept of the European army, who rejected the US China agenda. “We cannot accept to live in a bipolar world made up of the US and China,” he said.

    Macron’s once ‘controversial’ view is now mainstream thinking in Europe, especially as many EU policy-makers feel disowned, if not betrayed, by the US in Afghanistan. If this trajectory of mistrust continues, the first step towards the establishment of a European army could, in the near future, become an actuality.

    The post Following Afghanistan Defeat: Can EU Win Own ‘Independence’ from the US? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘Fortress USA’: How 9/11 produced a military industrial juggernaut

    ANALYSIS: By Clare Corbould, Deakin University

    Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.

    This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.

    This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.

    The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.

    The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.

    When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.

    General Dwight D. Eisenhower in second world war.
    General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day in the Second World War. Image: Wikimedia Commons

    The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.

    The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.

    Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.

    The military industrial juggernaut
    Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.

    This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.

    Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.

    More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.

    Detainees in a holding cell at the US-Mexico border.
    Detainees sleep in a holding cell where mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at the US-Mexico border. Image: The Conversation/Ross D. Franklin/AP

    The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.

    These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.

    Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.

    Normalisation of the security state
    Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.

    This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.

    Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.

    And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.

    Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.

    Atlanta police in riot gear.
    Atlanta police line up in riot gear before a protest in 2014. Image: The Conversation/Curtis Compton/AP

    Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend.

    The heavy cost of the war on terror
    The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.

    Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.

    The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.

    These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.

    Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.

    Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.

    Fighter jet in the Persian Gulf
    Sailor cleaning a fighter jet during aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2010. Image: The Conversation/Hasan Jamali/AP

    Life must be precious
    Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.

    In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,

    We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.

    In interviews with the filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara admitted, obliquely, to losing sight of the simple fact the victims of the militarised American state were, in fact, human beings.

    As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.

    The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.

    As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.The Conversation

    Dr Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty

    It was all marvellous for Paul Wolfowitz to get on Australian television (why bother?) to brusquely discuss those attacks on US soil in September 2001 and criticism of the invasion of Iraq by US-led forces.  After two decades, the former US deputy secretary of defense has not mellowed.

    With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion.  Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale of American power: he was a threat, and worldly threat at that.  In 2003, there was little evidence to suggest that, but neoconservatism has always been a doctrine in search of cartoonish myths.

    The fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction featured prominently as the reason for overthrowing Saddam became the necessitous outcome of bureaucratic sensibility: “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003, “we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction”.

    When those elusive WMDs proved stubbornly elusive, PW shifted his emphasis from security rationales to one of liberation.  Along the way he blamed the “consensus judgment of the intelligence community” for not getting it right in the first place, an assessment verging on the mendacious.

    While Saddam Hussein was a high grade butcher and villain to many of his people, it is hard to credit him with the Bond villain, pulp view Wolfowitz gives him.  Evidence chasers such as Ben Bonk at the Central Intelligence Agency were frustrated in being thrown at the fruitless effort to link Saddam to al-Qaeda.  Intelligence operatives were effectively being leaned upon to confect the record and find justifications.

    In 2013, Wolfowitz was still insisting on uncertainty as a principle.  “We still don’t know how all of this is going to end.”  He accepted that the decapitation of the Iraqi leadership without an immediate substitute might have been unwise.  The “idea that we’re going to come in like [General Douglas] MacArthur in Japan and write the constitution for them” was erroneous.

    That did not matter.  The threat was there and present, growing like a stimulated bacillus.  Depraved and disoriented, he takes the argument that invading Iraq at the time was appropriate because it would have had to happen in any case. Saddam was street store vendor, sponsor and patron of terrorism (he never defines the dimension of this, nor adduces evidence) and needed to be dealt with.  The sword would eventually have to be unsheathed.  “We would very likely either have had to go through this whole scenario all over but probably with higher costs for having delayed, or we’d be in a situation today where not only Iran was edging towards nuclear weapons but so was Iraq and also Libya.”

    In 2003, the aptly named Jeffrey Record reflected his surname’s worth by taking a hatchet to the Wolfowitz view in a scathing assessment for the Strategic Studies Institute.  In declaring a global war on terrorism (GWOT), the Bush administration had identified a range of states, weapons of danger, terrorists and terrorism while conflating “them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.”  Not sloppy, is Record.

    He goes on to note, relevantly, the conflation premise: that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were seen, amateurishly, “as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.”  This “strategic error of the first order” ignored “critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to US deterrence and military action” led to “an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq.  The result: “a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism” and the diversion of “attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda.”

    The 9/11 Commission Report, despite noting “friendly contacts” between Osama bin Laden and Iraqi officials at various points, similarly found “no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative personal relationship.”  Nor was there “evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

    Critics suggest incompetence and bungling in the invasion of Iraq.  They exclude venality and calculation.  Wolfowitz, as if anticipating a prosecution in some faraway court, has been busy covering his tracks and pointing the finger at other decision makers further up the greased pole.  The top suspect: current retiree amateur painter President George W. Bush.  “I don’t think I ever met the president alone.  I didn’t meet him very often.  [Secretary of State Colin] Powell had access to him whenever he wanted it.  And if he was so sure it was a mistake why didn’t he say so?”  What a merry band they make.

    Wolfowitz, for the defence, always has to play some useful (or useless) idiot card, proffered from the surrounds of the tired lecture circuit or the American Enterprise Institute.  He is ideologically inclined, evidentially challenged, and keen to accept material that confirms his prejudice rather than contradicts it.  When found wanting about his decisions on accepting, for instance, the bargain basement material of Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, he returned to common cultural themes.  “I don’t think anybody in that part of the world was completely straight with us.”

    Perhaps, after two decades, it is time to sort the books, order the records and call forth those architects of war who, dismally deluded and acting with criminal intent and incompetence, plunged a good part of the globe into conflict, leaving a legacy that continues to pollute with tenacious determination.  Along the way, we can mourn the dead of 9/11 and all the dead that followed.

    The post Paul Wolfowitz: Deluded and At Liberty first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare?

    Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.

    We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.

    That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.

    Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the U.S. response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy.

    Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”

    “You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”

    Even the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the U.S. created 10 new enemies. And thus the so-called Global War on Terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it.

    By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the United States vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the first place.

    In Libya and Syria, only ten years after 9/11, U.S. leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11th by recruiting and arming Al Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.

    The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. The only Republican Senator who voted against the war on Iraq, Lincoln Chafee, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

    But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House.

    Trump and Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the September 11th attack. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war.

    Barbara Lee, the only Member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against Congress’s war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut U.S. military spending by almost half:  $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every U.S. citizen $20,000, one would think that Rep. Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.

    Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for healthcare, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.

    These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people; and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proven worthless, as Biden has acknowledged.

    Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by America and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see.

    But the different paths chosen by U.S. and Chinese leaders are not predestined, and despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the U.S. corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than America’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the public.

    The perennial handicap that has dogged America’s diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, ”when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

    Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy, and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force.

    The rote declarations of U.S. leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the U.S. development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.

    By contrast, U.S. leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain American “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

    A “New American Century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.

    America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s U.S. war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.

    But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard.

    — We must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues. CODEPINK is part of a new coalition to “Cut the Pentagon for the people, planet, peace and a future” — please join us!

    — We must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the U.S. war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

    — We must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending U.S. vital interests,” “humanitarian intervention,” “the war on terror” and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” whose rules only apply to others — never to the United States.

    — And we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including U.S. weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia.

    Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.

    The post How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The “Longest War” Is Not Over

    Speaking from the White House on August 31, President Joe Biden lied to the people of the U.S. and to the world: “Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan — the longest war in American history.” The U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end— it has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that will be more politically sustainable, one more intractable and more easily exportable. As the president admitted, “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries.  We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it.  We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground — or very few, if needed.”

    Five days before, on the evening of Thursday, August 26, hours after a suicide bomb was detonated at the gate of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport killing and wounding scores of Afghans trying to flee their country and killing 18 U.S. soldiers, President Biden spoke to the world, “outraged as well as heartbroken,” he said. Many of us listening to the president’s speech, made before the victims could be counted and the rubble cleared, did not find comfort or hope in his words. Instead, our heartbreak and outrage were only amplified as Joe Biden seized the tragedy to call for more war.

    “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay,” he threatened. “I’ve also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities. We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose and the moment of our choosing.”

    The president’s threatened “moment of our choosing” came one day later, on Friday, August 27, when the U.S. military carried out a drone strike against what it said was an ISIS-K “planner” in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province. The U.S. military’s claim that it knows of “no civilian casualties” in the attack is contradicted by reports from the ground. “We saw that rickshaws were burning,” one Afghan witness said. “Children and women were wounded and one man, one boy and one woman had been killed on the spot.” Fear of an ISIS-K counterattack further hampered evacuation efforts as the U.S. Embassy warned U.S. citizens to leave the airport. “This strike was not the last,” said President Biden. On August 29, another U.S. drone strike killed a family of ten in Kabul.

    The first lethal drone strike in history occurred in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, when the CIA identified Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “or 98-percent probable it was he,” but the Hellfire missile launched by a Predator drone killed two unidentified men while Mullah Omar escaped. These two recent instances of “force and precision” ordered by Biden twenty years later, marked the presumed end to the war there just as it had begun. The intervening record has not been much better and, in fact, documents exposed by whistleblower Daniel Hale prove that the U.S. government is aware that 90% of its drone strike victims are not the intended targets.

    Zemari Ahmadi, who was killed in the August 29 drone strike in Kabul along with nine members of his family, seven of them young children, had been employed by a California based humanitarian organization and had applied for a visa to come to the U.S., as had Ahmadi’s nephew Nasser, also killed in the same attack. Nasser had worked with U.S. Special Forces in the Afghan city of Herat and had also served as a guard for the U.S. Consulate there. Whatever affinity the surviving members of Ahmadi’s family and friends might have had with the U.S. went up in smoke, that day. “America is the killer of Muslims in every place and every time,” said one relative who attended the funeral, “I hope that all Islamic countries unite in their view that America is a criminal.” Another mourner, a colleague of Ahmadi, said “We’re now much more afraid of drones than we are of the Taliban.”

    The fact that targeted killings like those carried out in Afghanistan and other places from 2001 to the present are counterproductive to the stated objectives of defeating terrorism, regional stability or of winning hearts and minds has been known by the architects of the “war on terror,” at least since 2009. Thanks to Wikileaks, we have access to a CIA document from that year, Making High-Value Targeting Operations an Effective Counterinsurgency Tool. Among the “key findings” in the CIA report, analysts warn of the negative consequences of assassinating so-called High Level Targets (HLT). “The potential negative effect of HLT operations, include increasing the level of insurgent support …, strengthening an armed group’s bonds with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group’s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or de-escalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.”

    The obvious truths that the CIA kept buried in a secret report have been admitted many times by high ranking officers implementing those policies. In 2013, General James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, reported in The New York Times, “We’re seeing that blowback. If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.” In a 2010 interview in Rollingstone, General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, figured that “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.” By the general’s equation, the U.S. created a minimum of 130 new enemies for itself in the strikes ordered by President Biden on August 27 and 29 alone.

    When the catastrophic consequences of a nation’s policies are so clearly predictable and evidently inevitable, they are intentional. What has happened to Afghanistan is not a series of mistakes or good intentions gone awry, they are crimes.

    In his novel, 1984, George Orwell foresaw a dystopian future where wars would be fought perpetually, not intended to be won or resolved in any way and President Eisenhower’s parting words as he left office in 1961 were a warning of the “grave implications” of the “military-industrial complex.” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange noted that these dire predictions had come to pass, speaking in 2011: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the U.S. and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”

    No, the war is not over. From a nation that should be promising reparations and begging the forgiveness of the people of Afghanistan comes the infantile raging, “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay” and while pledging to perpetuate the conditions that provoke terrorism, the parting taunt “and to ISIS-K: We are not done with you yet.”

    In the simplistic dualism of U.S. partisan politics, the issue seems to be only whether the current president should be blamed or should be given a pass and the blame put on his predecessor. This is a discussion that is not only irrelevant but a dangerous evasion of responsibility. 20 years of war crimes makes many complicit.

    In 1972, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings. Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” All of us in the U.S., the politicians, voters, tax payers, the investors and even those who protested and resisted it, are responsible for 20 years of war in Afghanistan. We are also all responsible for ending it.

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  • On Propaganda and Failed Narratives: New Understanding of Afghanistan is a Must

    For twenty years, two dominant narratives have shaped our view of the illegal US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and neither one of these narratives would readily accept the use of such terms as ‘illegal’, ‘invasion’ and ‘occupation.’

    The framing of the US ‘military intervention’ in Afghanistan, starting on October 7, 2001, as the official start of what was dubbed as a global ‘war on terror’ was left almost entirely to US government strategists. Former President, George W. Bush, his Vice President, Dick Cheney, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and an army of spokespersons, neoconservative ‘intellectuals’, journalists and so on, championed the military option as a way to rid Afghanistan of its terrorists, make the world a safe place and, as a bonus, bring democracy to Afghanistan and free its oppressed women.

    For that crowd, the US war in an already war-torn and extremely impoverished country was a just cause, maybe violent at times, but ultimately humanistic.

    Another narrative, also a western one, challenged the gung-ho approach used by the Bush administration, argued that democracy cannot be imposed by force, reminded Washington of Bill Clinton’s multilateral approach to international politics, warned against the ‘cut and run’ style of foreign policymaking, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.

    Although both narratives may have seemed at odds at times, in actuality they accepted the basic premise that the United States is capable of being a moral force in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Whether those who may refer to themselves as ‘antiwar’ realize this or not, they, too, subscribe to the same notion of American exceptionalism and ‘Manifest Destiny’ that Washington continues to assign to itself.

    The main difference between both of these narratives is that of methodology and approach and not whether the US has the right to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of another country, whether to ‘eradicate terrorism’ or to supposedly help a victim population, incapable of helping themselves and desperate for a western savior.

    However, the humiliating defeat suffered by the US in Afghanistan should inspire a whole new way of thinking, one that challenges all Western narratives, without exception, in Afghanistan and throughout the world.

    Obviously, the US has failed in Afghanistan, not only militarily and politically – let alone in terms of ‘state-building’ and every other way – the US-Western narratives on Afghanistan were, themselves, a failure. Mainstream media, which for two decades have reported on the country with a palpable sense of moral urgency, now seem befuddled. US ‘experts’ are as confused as ordinary people regarding the hasty retreat from Kabul, the bloody mayhem at the airport or why the US was in Afghanistan in the first place.

    Meanwhile, the ‘humanistic interventionists’ are more concerned with Washington’s ‘betrayal’ of the Afghan people, ‘leaving them to their fate’, as if the Afghans are irrational beings with no agency of their own, or as if the Afghan people have called on the Americans to invade their country or have ‘elected’ American generals as their democratic representatives.

    The US-Western propaganda, which has afflicted our collective understanding of Afghanistan for twenty years and counting, has been so overpowering to the point that we are left without the slightest understanding of the dynamics that led to the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country. The latter group is presented in the media as if entirely alien to the socio-economic fabric of Afghanistan. This is why the Taliban’s ultimate victory seemed, not only shocking but extremely confusing as well.

    For twenty years, the very little we knew about the Taliban has been communicated to us through Western media analyses and military intelligence assessments. With the Taliban’s viewpoint completely removed from any political discourse pertaining to Afghanistan, an alternative Afghan national narrative was carefully constructed by the US and its NATO partners. These were the ‘good Afghans’, we were told, ones who dress up in Western-style clothes, speak English, attend international conferences and, supposedly, respect women. These were also the Afghans who welcomed the US occupation of their country, as they benefited greatly from Washington’s generosity.

    If those ‘good Afghans’ truly represented Afghan society, why did their army of 300,000 men drop their weapons and flee the country, along with their President, without a serious fight? And if the 75,000 poorly-armed and, at times, malnourished Taliban seemed to merely represent themselves, why then did they manage to defeat formidable enemies in a matter of days?

    There can be no argument that an inferior military power, like that of the Taliban, could have possibly persisted, and ultimately won, such a brutal war over the course of many years, without substantial grassroots support pouring in from the Afghan people in large swathes of the country. The majority of the Taliban recruits who have entered Kabul on August 15 were either children, or were not even born, when the US invaded their country, all those years ago. What compelled them to carry arms? To fight a seemingly unwinnable war? To kill and be killed? And why did they not join the more lucrative business of working for the Americans, like many others have?

    We are just beginning to understand the Taliban narrative, as their spokespersons are slowly communicating a political discourse that is almost entirely unfamiliar to most of us. A discourse that we were not allowed to hear, interact with or understand.

    Now that the US and its NATO allies are leaving Afghanistan, unable to justify or even explain why their supposed humanitarian mission led to such an embarrassing defeat, the Afghan people are left with the challenge of weaving their own national narrative, one that must transcend the Taliban and their enemies to include all Afghans, regardless of their politics or ideology.

    Afghanistan is now in urgent need of a government that truly represents the people of that country. It must grant rights to education, to minorities and to political dissidents, not to acquire a Western nod of approval, but because the Afghan people deserve to be respected, cared for and treated as equals. This is the true national narrative of Afghanistan that must be nurtured outside the confines of the self-serving Western mischaracterization of Afghanistan and her people.

    The post On Propaganda and Failed Narratives: New Understanding of Afghanistan is a Must first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • What Next After US Defeat?

    There may no longer be US military boots on the ground in Afghanistan, but there are still plenty of Afghan boots that Washington can mobilize to destabilize the country and, more importantly, the region.

    Already there are tribal leaders in the Panjshir province declaring the beginning of anti-Taliban resistance. One of them, Ahmad Massoud, the young leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, wrote an opinion column in the Washington Post last week in which he appealed to the US for weapons and support to “once again take on the Taliban”.

    Another allied leader is former Vice President of Afghanistan, Amrullah Saleh, who is also based in Panjshir province – the only area not under the control of the Taliban* – and who has vowed that he will never share the same roof as the dominant militant group.

    This week marks a historic and shameful defeat for the United States in Afghanistan after 20 years of futile, destructive military occupation. Two decades since launching a war in the country to oust the Taliban rulers, the latter is back now in power. And what’s more, they are militarily stronger than ever after inheriting entire arsenals of American weaponry abandoned by the fleeing US troops.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, trying to put a positive spin on the debacle, said the military mission was over and “a new chapter” of diplomacy was opening. We can safely bet that “diplomacy” here is a euphemism for Washington’s political sabotage and machinations to ensure Afghanistan feels the full wrath of Uncle Sam’s vindictiveness for years, if not decades, to come.

    Early signs indicate the form. Since the Taliban took control of Kabul on August 15, Washington has frozen some $7 billion in foreign assets belonging to the state of Afghanistan. The Americans have also ordered the International Monetary Fund to cut off nearly $400 million in immediate funds that were due to Kabul. This suggests that the US is shaping up for a new chapter of economic warfare against the Taliban in much the same way that it has inflicted on Iran following the Islamic Revolution in 1979 against the US-backed Shah, and also more recently against Syria following the defeat of America’s proxy war for regime change.Many other nations that defy the US militarily end up incurring economic terrorism from Washington. Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela, among others.

    However, in addition to economic warfare, the United States could also exercise the option of fueling a proxy military conflict – a civil war – in Afghanistan by sponsoring the anti-Taliban factions. These factions can be traced to the Northern Alliance and the Haqqani Network which the US-backed in the proxy war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. No doubt, the CIA and Pentagon still maintain contact lines with these warlords. The fact that one of them was given a high-profile platform in the Washington Post last week to appeal for weapons to fight against the Taliban is a clear sign of such deep state influence.

    It is significant that Russia, China and other regional countries are wary of security repercussions stemming from an unruly Afghanistan. Russia has rebuked the US over its freezing of Afghanistan’s assets, saying that the country needs international support, not isolation, in order to aid war reconstruction and stability. Likewise, China has engaged with the new Taliban authorities with promises of massive economic investment to develop infrastructure and industries in return for guarantees of regional security.

    This alludes to a wider strategy by Washington. Fomenting proxy conflict in Afghanistan through military and economic means is not just a matter of narrow vindictiveness against the Taliban conquerors who gave Uncle Sam a bloody nose for all the world to see. Such machinations provide the US with opportunities to cause regional security problems for Russia and China. One can reasonably surmise that the Americans have been exploiting Afghanistan as a spoiler against Russia and China for at least 40 years, not just the last two decades.

    Afghanistan could potentially become a linchpin in China’s global economic development plans. The country sits at the crossroads of China’s new silk routes crisscrossing between Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Given that the Biden, Trump and Obama administrations have all prioritized “containing” China and Russia as “great power rivals”, it seems that postwar Afghanistan presents a different opportunity for American imperial ambitions.

    From Washington’s cynical point of view, such a new phase of proxy war in Afghanistan and, more widely in the region, would be a lot less costly compared with the full military occupation over the past 20 years involving $2 trillion expenditure. Plus there are no disturbing scenes of body bags arriving back on American soil.

    Thus, celebrating the defeat of the US in Afghanistan comes with caution. The next chapter could be an even more murky and sinister story.

    * The Taliban is a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other countries.

    * First published in Sputnik

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Finian Cunningham.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Droning Disasters: A US Strike on Kabul

    No more profoundly disturbing statement was needed.  In the dying days of the official US departure from Kabul, a US drone etched its butcher’s legacy with a strike supposedly intended for the blood-lusty terrorist group ISIS-K, an abbreviation of Islamic State in Khorasan Province.  Its members had taken responsibility for blasts outside Harmid Karzai International Airport that had cost the lives of at least 175 individuals and 13 US service personnel.  Suicide bombers had intended to target “translators and collaborators with the American army”.

    President Joe Biden promised swift retribution. “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive.  We will not forget.  We will hunt you down and make you pay.” American “interests and our people” would be defended “with every measure at my command.”

    In his sights was ISIS-K.  “I’ve also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities.”  A response “with force and precision” would take place “at our time, at the place we choose and a moment of our choosing.”

    On August 28, an announcement by the Pentagon was made that two “high-profile” members of the group had been killed in a drone strike in Khorasan Province.  That same day, the President warned that the group was likely to conduct another attack.  The US military was readying itself.

    The following day, to demonstrate such precision and choice, a vehicle supposedly carrying an unspecified number of suicide bombers linked to ISIS-K and speeding towards Kabul airport was struck in a second drone attack.  The site of the attack, being a residential neighbourhood in the city, should have given room for pause to those precisionists in the military.

    The strike was meant to leave a lasting impression upon ISIS-K fighters.  Initially, US officials were pleased to inform the Associated Press that “multiple suicide bombers” had perished in the attack.  “US military forces conducted a self-defence unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike today on a vehicle in Kabul, eliminating an imminent ISIS-K threat to Harmid Karzai International Airport,” stated US Central Command spokesperson Capt. Bill Urban.

    The outcome of the strike was apparently something to be proud of.  “Significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material.”  But this came with a rounding caveat. “We’re assessing the possibilities of civilian casualties, although we have no indications at this time.”

    The story started to congeal over interviews, discussions and threads.  A dribble of information suggested loss of civilian life.  A number quickly emerged in the flood that followed: ten family members had lost their lives.  From the New York Times, there was Matthieu Aikins patching things together.  Bodies were named: Somaya, daughter of Zemari.  Farzard, Zemari’s son, also killed.  The narrative twists, inverts and disturbs more: Zemari’s nephew, Naser, was an Afghan army officer, former guard of the US military.  He had applied for an SIV (Special Immigrant Visa), hoping to flee Afghanistan for the United States.

    To the BBC, Ramin Yousufi, a relative of the victims, could only tearfully despair. “It’s wrong, it’s a brutal attack, and it’s happened based on wrong information.”  Questions followed.  “Why have they killed our family?  Our children?  They are so burned out we cannot identify their bodies, their faces.”

    At a press briefing on August 30, Army Maj. Gen. William “Hank” Taylor of the Joint Staff tried to make something of yet another messy bungle in the annals of the US military.  “We are aware of reports of civilian casualties. We take these reports extremely seriously.”  John F. Kirby, Pentagon press secretary, was “not going to get ahead of it.  But if we have significant – verifiable information that we did take innocent life here, then we will be transparent about that, too.  Nobody wants to see that happen.”  Urban also stated that the Pentagon was aware of civilian casualties “following our strike on a vehicle in Kabul today.”

    The attack had that sheen of atrocious incompetence (Kirby preferred the term “dynamic”), but that would be a misreading.  Killing remotely is, by its nature, inaccurate, though it has a disturbing fan club deluded into thinking otherwise.  The death of civilians, subsumed under the euphemism of collateral damage, is often put down to shonky intelligence rather than the machinery itself.  As Rachel Stohl of the Stimson Centre is a case in point.  “These are precise weapons,” she erroneously observed in 2016.  “The failure is in the intelligence about who it is that we are killing”.

    Drone strikes have demonstrated, time and again, to lack the mythical precision with which they are billed.  Those in proximity to the target will be slain.  Whole families have been, and will continue, to be pulverised.  “Gradually,” the New York Times observed with stunning obviousness in 2015, “it has become clear that when operators in Nevada fire missiles into remote tribal territories on the other side of the world, they often do not know who they are killing, but are making an imperfect best guess.”

    In 2016, research conducted by the Bureau of Investigative journalism found that the lethal returns from the US-UAV program proved to be overwhelmingly civilian.  A mere 3.5% could be said, with any certainty, to be terrorists.

    The use of drones in combat is also politically baffling, self-defeating and contradictory.  As Michael Boyle has explained, referring to the use of UAV warfare in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, such a counterterrorism strategy was distinctly at odds in providing, on the one hand, a flow of arms and financial resource to the very governments whose legitimacy they undermined through the use of such strikes.  By all means, we supply you, but have no trust in your competence.

    A mere month after the conviction of whistleblower Daniel Hale, who did more than any other to reveal the grotesque illusion of reliability behind the US drone program, UAV warfare was again shown to be a butchering enterprise praised by the precisionists and found politically wanting.  Those attending the funerals of the slain family members, an event taking place in the shadow of US power in retreat, needed little convincing who their enemy was.

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  • Afghanistan: Drug Trade and Belt and Road

    All flags are on half-mast in the US of A. The cause is the 13 American soldiers killed in this huge suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday, 26 August.

    As it stands, at least 150 people – Afghans, including at least 30 Taliban, plus 13 American military – were killed and at least 1,300 injured, according to the Afghan Health Ministry.

    The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the bombing via Amaq Media, the official Islamic State (ISIS) news agency. The perpetrators, the message says, were members of the ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.

    As reported by RT, US military leaders knew “hours in advance” that a “mass casualty event” was planned at Kabul airport. However, accounts from the troops in harm’s way suggest that nothing was done to protect them or the airport. See here.

    RT further reports: “The bombing provoked the US into launching two drone strikes, one targeting an alleged “planner” and “facilitator” with the group responsible, and another supposedly wiping out “multiple” would-be suicide bombers but reportedly annihilating a family and children alongside them.

    Why was nothing done to prevent this bloody, atrocious attack?  In fact, the Pentagon announced just yesterday that another massive attack was likely, meaning they have information that another mass-killing may take place?

    In the meantime, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that the last three US military transport planes have departed the Hamid Karzai Airport just ahead of the August 31, 2021, deadline, officially ending the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

    “The war is over. America’s last troops have just left Kabul airport,” RT’s Murad Gazdiev tweeted from Kabul, adding that the war lasted “19 years, 10 months and 25 days.”

    What he didn’t say is that the monetary cost of the war was at least 3 trillion dollars, that about 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians. These figures include (through April 2021) 2,448 American service members; 3,846 U.S. contractors, and some 66,000 Afghan national military and police.

    Twenty years of war – and only ten days to defeat the US military.

    Really? Is this really the end of the US involvement in Afghanistan? Too many strange events and occurrences are pointing in a different direction.

    Let’s have a closer look. The Islamic State — ISIS — claims responsibility. As we know by now and since quite a while, ISIS is a creation of the CIA. The sophistication of the attack, the Pentagon non-interference, despite their prior knowledge, might, just might indicate that this attack may have been a well-coordinated “false flag”?

    Who benefits? Cui Bono?

    On August 19, 2021, the Washington Post, referring to President Trump’s Peace Agreement with Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, reports:

    As President Donald Trump’s administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we’ll be successful in the end.” His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, asserted that the administration was “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.

    Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is pointing to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.

    But Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.

    So, again who benefits from such an atrociously deadly attack like the one of 26 August at Kabul Airport?

    President Biden, though unjustified, can and does blame President Trump for the chaos he left behind by negotiating this “irresponsible” Peace Deal. Why “irresponsible”?  Wasn’t it time after 20 years without apparent “success” – whatever that means, or may have meant at some point in time – to end this senseless bloodshed and destruction of a sovereign Afghan society let alone the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians?

    It seems that Mr. Trump may have done the right thing. Peace over war should always win, on the ground as well as in the minds of people, and foremost of politicians. However, there are several reasons, why Peace is not welcome. And chaos and destruction and death as demonstrated by the 26 August suicide attack, and who knows, maybe more to follow, might justify sending back US troops?

    There are several other irons in the fire about which hardly anybody talks and the bought anti-Trump and pro-Biden mainstream media are silent.

    The Heroin Trade

    There is a multi-multi-billion, perhaps up to a trillion-dollar heroin trade at stake, for the US and for the US and European pharma-industry – the huge and deadly opioid-market.

    As reported by Michel Chossudovsky on 21 August 2021:

    One of the key strategic objectives of the 2001 war on Afghanistan was to restore the opium trade following the Taliban government’s successful 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a 94% collapse in opium production. This program was supported by the United Nations. (For details, see below)

    In the course of the last 19 years following the US-NATO October 2001 invasion, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. In turn the number of heroin addicts in the US has increased dramatically. Is there a relationship?

    There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan.

    By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users).

    In 2020, at the height of the covid crisis, deaths from opioids and drug addiction increased threefold.

    It’s Big Money for Big Pharma.”

    See the full report here.

    The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative

    Both China and Russia have already indicated that they would help the new Taliban regime to gain stability and to develop towards a newly independent, sovereign state. Afghanistan’s border with China, only about 70 km wide, but it forms a crucial connection to China’s western most Province, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It is a vital pivot for China’s Belt and Road, or “One Belt One Road” – OBOR – also called the New Silk Road.

    While transit routes already go through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, an OBOR rail and road transit through Afghanistan would connect China directly with Iran, facilitating among other trade, hydrocarbon transport from Iran to China. OBOR would also be an effective development instrument for war destroyed Afghanistan. A reconstruction and economic development scheme for Afghanistan could bring Afghanistan back to a respected nation state — even through the Taliban.

    Furthermore, Afghanistan might be prepared for becoming an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), one of the world’s most significant political, economic and strategic defense organizations. In addition to China and Russia and the Central Asian former Soviet Republics, India and Pakistan are already full members, while Iran, Malaysia and Mongolia are, so far, in observer and associate status.

    SCO covers almost half of the world population and controls some 30% of the world’s GDP. Afghanistan would be in a solid and guiding association as a  SCO member. Afghanistan’s socioeconomic development and improvement of war-damaged people’s standard of living, could benefit enormously.

    Washington, however, dislikes OBOR with a passion. They see it as Chinese expansionism and competition. It is actually neither. China has in her thousands of years of history never had expansionist trends, or ambitions, and always respected other countries’ sovereignty. OBOR, an ingenious idea of President Xi Jinping, is patterned according to the ancient Silk Road, a trading route of 2100 years ago connecting Asia with Europe and the Middle East.

    OBOR is an instrument to help develop and connect the world, while respecting each nation state’s independence and sovereignty.

    The hugely profitable Heroin Trade and the further development of China’s OBOR – and particularly bringing Afghanistan under the wings of the east through association with the SCO – would spoil America’s multi-multibillion heroin trade, as well as another Middle East country would orient itself to the east – and away from the fangs of the ever weakening and crumbling Anglo-US empire.

    Hence, commanding US-created ISIS to sow chaos and death in Afghanistan, blaming the Taliban, might be a good reason for Biden to bring back US troops – to fight a new kind of war – fighting for the continuing highly profitable heroin trade and, simultaneously, fighting against OBOR. On top of it all, it would suit Biden and his globalist agenda image and standing in a totally misinformed world.

    The post Afghanistan: Drug Trade and Belt and Road first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghanistan Collapse reveals Beltway Media’s Loyalty to Permanent War State

    Biden’s popular and long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan triggered a big media meltdown that exposed its de facto merger with the military.

    In the wake of a remarkably successful Taliban offensive capped by the takeover of Kabul, the responses of corporate media provided what may have been the most dramatic demonstration ever of its fealty to the Pentagon and military leadership. The media did so by mounting a full-throated political attack on President Joe Biden’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan and a defense of the military’s desire for an indefinite presence in the country.

    Biden’s failure to establish a plan for evacuating tens of thousands of Afghans seeking to the flee the new Taliban regime made him a soft target for the Beltway media’s furious assault. However, it was Biden’s refusal last Spring to keep 4,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan on an indefinite basis – flouting an aggressive Pentagon lobbying campaign – that initially triggered the rage of the military brass.

    The media offensive against Biden’s Afghan withdrawal advanced arguments that the military could not make on its own – at least, not in public. It also provided the military with important cover at the moment when it was at its most vulnerable for its disastrous handling of the entire war.

    Among the most disingenuous attempts at salvaging the military’s reputation was a Washington Post article blaming the Afghan catastrophe on an over-emphasis on “democratic values” while ignoring the the tight alliance between the U.S. military and despotic warlords which drove local support for the Taliban.

    Playing the al Qaeda threat card

    On the eve of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the New York Times’s David Sanger and Helene Cooper fired the opening salvo of the Beltway media’s assault on Biden’s decision. Sanger and Cooper began by acknowledging that the U.S. military had “overestimated” the results of its intervention for years, and that the failure of the Afghan government to pay soldiers for months had sapped the will to resist the Taliban.

    But they then homed in on Biden’s refusal to keep troops in Afghanistan for counter-terrorism purposes. Recalling that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley had tried in the Spring to compel Biden to maintain 3,000 to 4,500 troops in the country, Sanger and Cooper cited “intelligence estimates predicting that in two or three years, Al Qaeda could find a new foothold in Afghanistan.”

    That speculation was based on the assumption that the Taliban would allow such a development despite its well-established record of opposing al Qaeda’s use of its territory to plan terrorism abroad. In fact, the Taliban’s policy went back to before 9/11, when Osama bin Laden formally agreed to honor the Taliban’s restrictions while secretly plotting the 9/11 attacks in Germany rather than in Afghanistan.

    In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, the Taliban has an even stronger motivation to prevent any jihadist organizations from planning international terror attacks from Afghan territory.

    To support their broadside against Biden’s withdrawal, the Times’ Sanger and Cooper turned to the retired general with arguably the greatest personal vested interest in an indefinite U.S. military presence in Afghanistan: former U.S. commander in Afghanistan Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw the war effort from 2010 through 2011 and has since led a group of former commanders and diplomats lobbying for an endless US presence in the country.

    Petraeus asserted that Biden failed to “recognize the risk incurred by the swift withdrawal” of intelligence drones and close air support, and thousands of contractors who had kept the Afghan Air Force flying.”

    Next, Sanger and Cooper turned to Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of one of the most militaristic think tanks in Washington, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

    As The Grayzone has reported, CNAS has reaped millions in funding from the arms industry and US government institutions to advance Pentagon and military thinking inside the Beltway. Among the many Beltway media insiders that enjoy writers in residence fellowships at the think tank is the New York Times’ Sanger.

    For his part, Fontaine complained that the Biden administration had failed to continue providing the contractors that the Afghan Air Force depended on to keep its planes in the air. But he failed to acknowledge the obvious point that contractors would be unable to function in Afghanistan without sufficient U.S.-NATO troops to provide military protection on the ground.

    On August 16, after the US-backed Afghan government was eliminated, the liberal interventionist magazine, Foreign Policy, chimed in with another attack on Biden featuring interviews with “a dozen people who held posts in Afghanistan.”

    According to Foreign Policy, current and former diplomats anonymously expressed “deep anger, shock and bitterness about the collapse of the government they spent decades trying to build.” Several currently-serving officials were quoted — again off the record — about their considering resigning in protest, citing an “overwhelming sense of guilt and fear for the lives of former Afghan colleagues and local staff whom the American government left behind.”

    That same day, the New Yorker’s Robin Wright expressed similar anguish over the harrowing images of U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. In an article subtitled, “It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably,” she lamented that the United States “is engaged in what historians may some day call a Great Retreat from a ragtag army that has no air power….”

    The U.S. retreat from Afghanistan, Wright asserted, is “part of an unnerving American pattern dating back to the 1970s,” starting with Reagan’s pull-out from Beirut and Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. Echoing those insisting on an indefinite U.S. military role in Afghanistan, Wright claimed that because the Taliban had “won a key battle against democracy in Afghanistan,” the country would “again, almost certainly become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of al Qaeda or others in search of a sponsor.”

    Meanwhile, during an August 21 panel on PBS’s Washington Week, Peter Baker of the New York Times, Anne Gearan of the Washington Post and Vivian Salama of the Wall Street Journal formed a one-note chorus blaming Biden’s hasty withdrawal for the crowds of anguished Afghans desperately seeking to escape the Taliban at Kabul’s airport.

    The implicit – and clearly fanciful – premise of the discussion was that the United States could have somehow embarked weeks or months earlier on a sweeping program to rescue tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of interpreters and other collaborators with the U.S. military, and that it could all be done cleanly and efficiently, without triggering any panic.

    A second theme pressed by the New York Times’ Baker was that Biden had been heedless of the risks of his policy to U.S. national security. Baker said Biden had made up his mind a decade ago that the U.S. must withdraw from Afghanistan and was determined to do it “regardless of what Gen. Milley and others might have warned him about the danger of a collapse.” Baker made the same argument, along with the others embraced by his big media colleagues, in a long-winded August 20 news analysis.

    Flournoy obscures the real cause of military failure

    The Washington Post’s national security reporter, Greg Jaffe, took a different tack from most of his Beltway colleagues in his coverage of the Afghanistan endgame. In an August 14 article, Jaffe implicitly acknowledged the widely-accepted fact that the war had been an abject failure, contradicting claims by military leaders. Unfortunately, the reporter offered space for one particularly credibility-deprived former official that was obviously designed to deaden popular hostility toward those responsible for the fiasco.

    Among the most questionable characters to lay into Biden’s withdrawal strategy was Michelle Flournoy, who was expected to be appointed as the next Secretary of Defense until Biden froze her out because of her role in advocating the failed troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration.

    Flournoy had been Obama’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and was responsible for supporting the commanders in the field from the Pentagon. Prior to that role, she co-founded CNAS, the arms industry-backed, Democratic Party-affiliated propaganda mill for the Pentagon and military services.

    In a revealing interview with the Post’s Jaffe, the former Pentagon official blamed the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan on an excessive commitment to “democratic ideals,” arguing they supposedly blinded the policymakers to the realities on the ground. It all started, she claimed, with “the Afghan constitution that was created in Bonn and…was trying to create a Western democracy.” The policymakers set the bar “on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context,” she added.

    But the problem was not an excessive U.S. concern for promoting democracy, but the way that U.S. policy sold out “democratic ideals” to support a group of warlords who represented the essence of anti-democratic despotism.

    In explaining the Obama administration’s decision to more than double the totals of U.S. troops, Flournoy claimed that she and other U.S. officials only discovered the festering wound of Afghan corruption when it was too late, fatally dooming the military strategy. “We had made a big bet only to learn that our local partner was rotten,” she insisted.

    However, Flournoy deliberately obscured the crucial fact that the U.S. war was based from its very inception on an alliance with a group of corrupt and murderous warlords. The military leadership, as well as the CIA, relied on the warlords because they had militias and were ready to oppose the Taliban. The warlords offered a steady supply of militiamen as police in the provinces and were given well-paid contracts to provide security for the constant flow of convoys to and from U.S. and NATO bases.

    But the militia-police maintained their loyalty to their respective warlords, rather than to any civilian government in Kabul, and in return were given a free hand to steal from Afghans, falsely accuse them of crimes, torture them and release them only for a ransom. In many cases, the police extorted money from local families by abducting and raping their wives, daughters and sons — a pattern of abuse documented by Amnesty International as early as 2003.

    The Taliban easily ousted the U.S.-supported regime from large parts of Afghanistan’s Helmand province beginning in 2005-06 because of the local population’s hatred of the lawless warlord militias designated by the U.S. military as police. And when U.S. troops re-occupied those districts in 2009, the militias returned to their brutal ways — including abducting and raping pre-teen boys, prompting bitter complaints from the local residents to the U.S. marines and threats to support the Taliban if the U.S. didn’t intervene to stop them.  But the U.S. military never moved to disturb its cozy relationship with the warlords.

    So Flournoy’s claim that senior military and Pentagon officials were unaware of the corruption of their Afghan allies until after the Obama administration’s massive commitment of troops is simply devoid of credibility. When she and other key policymakers made their “big bet” later in 2009, they were fully aware that the U.S. was backing a group of powerful warlords whose militia-police were committing heinous abuses against the population that forced Afghans to support the Taliban as their only defense.

    The patent falsehoods peddled by the Beltway press corps in response to the Biden withdrawal reveals just how tightly they have become linked to the interests of the military and Pentagon. And its flamboyant opposition to a pull-out favored by a solid majority of the American public is yet another factor that will accelerate the decline of an already cratering corporate media.

    • First published in The Greyzone

    The post Afghanistan Collapse reveals Beltway Media’s Loyalty to Permanent War State first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gareth Porter.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Afghanistan:  a military and an “aid” failure

    While recent events have destroyed the credibility of militarists who pushed for the invasion and 20-year-long occupation of Afghanistan, the moral bankruptcy of their supporters in the aid industry has also been stunningly revealed.

    A quick Taliban victory over the foreign trained “Afghan army” at least (momentarily) embarrassed Canadian militarists. But what about their camp followers in the NGO universe?

    Over the past two decades Ottawa has plowed over $3.6 billion in “aid” into Afghanistan. During this period the central Asian country has been the top recipient of official assistance, receiving about twice the next biggest destination, another victim of Canadian foreign policy, Haiti.

    While Afghanistan is undoubtedly deserving of aid, 10 countries have a lower GDP per capita and 20 countries have a lower life expectancy. So why the focus on Afghanistan? Because it was the place where policymakers thought aid was most likely to have positive results? Of course not. The aid was delivered to support the Canadian, US, and NATO military occupation.

    Canadian personnel repeatedly linked development work in Afghanistan to the counterinsurgency effort. “It’s a useful counterinsurgency tool,” is how Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Doucette, commander of Canada’s provincial reconstruction team, described the Canadian International Development Agency’s work in Afghanistan. Development assistance, for instance, was sometimes given to communities in exchange for information on combatants. After a roadside bomb hit his convoy in September 2009, Canadian General Jonathan Vance spent 50 minutes berating village elders for not preventing the attack. “If we keep blowing up on the roads,” he told them, “I’m going to stop doing development.”

    The CF worked closely with NGOs in Afghanistan. A 2007 parliamentary report explained that some NGOs “work intimately with military support already in the field.” Another government report noted that the “Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) platoon made up of Army Reserve soldiers organizes meetings with local decision-makers and international NGOs to determine whether they need help with security.”

    The aid was also a public relations exercise. At politically sensitive moments in the war Canadian officials sought to showcase newly built schools or dams to divert attention from more unsavory sides of military conflict. Alarmed about a growing casualty list and other negative news, in fall 2006, the Prime Minister’s Office directed the military to “push” reconstruction stories on journalists embedded with the military. Through an access to information request the Globe and Mail obtained an email from Major Norbert Cyr saying, “the major concern [at Privy Council Office] is whether we are pushing development issues with embeds.” In an interview with Jane’s Defence Weekly’s Canadian correspondent, a journalist described what this meant on the ground. “We’ve been invited on countless village medical outreach visits, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and similar events.” The hope was that reporters embedded at the Canadian base in Kandahar would file more stories about development projects and fewer negative subjects.

    At a broader level aid was used to reinforce the foreign occupation. The aim was to support the Afghan forces allied with the US-led occupation. Canada’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan led to a drop in aid, and now that US forces have withdrawn, Canadian aid will likely dry up.

    Historically, military intervention elicits aid. Call it the ‘intervention-equals-aid’ principle or ‘wherever Canadian or US troops kill, Ottawa provides aid’ principle.

    Ottawa delivered $7.25 million to South Korea during the early 1950s Korean War. Tens of millions of dollars in Canadian aid supported US policy in South Vietnam in the 1960s and during the 1990-91 Iraq war Canada provided $75 million in assistance to people in countries affected by the Gulf crisis. Amidst the NATO bombing in 1999-2000 the former Yugoslavia was the top recipient of Canadian assistance. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq Canada announced a $300 million aid package to that country.

    As mentioned above, Haiti has been the second largest recipient of Canadian aid over the past two decades. While an elected, pro-poor government was in place between 2001 and 2004 Canadian aid to Haiti was reduced to a trickle. But after the US, French and Canadian invasion ousted thousands of elected officials in 2004, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Haiti. Throughout the 15-year UN occupation, Canadian aid continued to flow.

    In the years after invasions by foreign troops, Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti were the top recipients of Canadian “aid”. The thread that connected those three countries was the presence of Canadian or US troops.

    Should it even be called aid when it comes along with foreign soldiers? A better description would be the “break it and you pay for it” principle.

    Where is the discussion of all this in the NGO world? Canada’s international assistance policy gets a free ride — of course, we’re a force for good — in the mainstream media. But does anyone really believe it’s good for “aid” to be tied to military occupation?

    Will those who uncritically promote increased Canadian “aid” discuss its ties to the disaster in Afghanistan? Are any of the NGOs that followed foreign troops to Afghanistan speaking out about their error?

    • Yves Engler’s Stand on Guard For Whom?  A People’s History of the Canadian Military is now available.

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghan Crisis Must End America’s Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty

    Millions of Afghans have been displaced by the war.  Photo: MikrofonNews

    Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.

    Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.

    Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

    The U.S. and other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding aid and recognition gave them “very considerable leverage – economic, diplomatic and political” over the Taliban.

    Western politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some power in the new government, and that Western influence and interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return. This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros, but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.

    To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies’ 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban.

    The reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop over 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years.

    Since the United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for U.S. soldiers wounded in Afghanistan already amount to over $175 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could eventually top a trillion dollars.

    So what about “rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated $144 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security forces” that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent between 2008 and 2017 was documented as “waste, fraud and abuse” by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

    The crumbs left over, less than 2% of total U.S. spending on Afghanistan, amount to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the Afghan people in economic development, healthcare, education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid.

    But, as in Iraq, the government the U.S installed in Afghanistan was notoriously corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked U.S.-occupied Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the world.

    Western readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in Afghanistan, as opposed to a particular feature of the U.S. occupation, but this is not the case. TI notes that ”it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels.” A 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that “corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations.”

    Those administrations would include the Taliban government that U.S. invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist governments that were overthrown by the U.S.-deployed precursors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they had made in education, healthcare and women’s rights.

    A 2010 report by former Reagan Pentagon official Anthony H. Cordesman, entitled “How America Corrupted Afghanistan”, chastised the U.S. government for throwing gobs of money into that country with virtually no accountability.

    The New York Times reported in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with U.S. dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.

    Corruption also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up as the successes of the occupation, like education and healthcare. The education system has been riddled with schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are stocked with fake, expired or low quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil servants like teachers earning only one-tenth the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and contractors.

    Rooting out corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to the primary U.S. goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or extending its puppet government’s control. As TI reported, “The U.S. has intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information, and cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling grievances against the Afghan government and channelling material support to the insurgency.”

    The endless violence of the U.S. occupation and the corruption of the U.S.-backed government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in rural areas where three quarters of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of occupied Afghanistan also contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.

    Well before the current crisis, the number of Afghans reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018 Gallup poll found the lowest levels of self-reported “well-being” that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record levels of misery but also unprecedented hopelessness about their future.

    Despite some gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan girls attended primary school in 2019 and only 37% of adolescent Afghan girls were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in Afghanistan is that more than two million children between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken families.

    Yet instead of atoning for our role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three quarters of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP.

    In effect, the United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second, economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their “leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other victims of U.S. economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran.

    After pouring trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s main duty now is to help the 40 million Afghans who have not fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and trauma of the war America inflicted on them, as well as a massive drought that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third wave of covid-19.

    The U.S. should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in U.S. banks. It should shift the $6 billion allocated for the now defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for $1.3 billion in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.

    Once upon a time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat Germany and Japan, and then helped to rebuild them as healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s serious faults – its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries – America held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries around the world were ready to follow.

    If all the United States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to be moving on and looking at new models to follow: new experiments in popular and social democracy; renewed emphasis on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use of military force to resolve international problems; and more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises like the Covid pandemic and the climate disaster.

    The United States can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help to build.

    The post Afghan Crisis Must End America’s Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US: the Sickness Unto Death

    As soon as I heard Biden say, “We will hunt you down,” about the Afghan airport bombers, I knew that the US would immediately kill some Afghan women and children. The US will slaughter women and children at the drop of a smallpox blanket, an H-bomb, Agent Orange or a reaper drone. When the rampaging trillion-dollar-a-year military and surveillance empire feels it has been wronged there is no limit to its blood lust.

    So today we have the report that the US drone-striked an Afghan family, killing six children, ages two to ten, and three adults. The empire’s mockingbird media will spin this as unfortunate but necessary and, no matter how much evidence the empire offers to the contrary, US serfs will believe that they have rights and freedoms and are a “model” for the world. So another story today won’t faze them any more than dead Afghan children:

    Today former New York Times science writer Alex Berenson was permanently banned from the intelligence agency tentacle known as Twitter. Berenson tweeted that the covid vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission — which is exactly what the vaccine pushers themselves have said previously — the vaccines only lessen symptoms — but the little people aren’t allowed to tell truths about lockdowns or vaccines — vaccines developed and marketed at “warp speed” and so obviously harmless, useful and necessary that tens of millions of people have to be bribed, brainwashed, threatened, vilified, censored, entered in million dollar lotteries, thrown out of work and smashed back to feudalism in order for people to take them.

    “Covid” is no more going to end than the war on terror ended. It’s too profitable, it’s a gold mine. Covid even has a bigger market — a potential 7 billion customers shot up with yearly boosters. Whenever the government declares a war something — Communism, drugs, cancer, terrorism — the war will be endless, highly profitable for a few, and send the working class majority running in fear farther and farther away from truth, health and answers.

    The vaccine is your God. The vaccine is your government. The vaccine will decide how much 1st Amendment you get. The vaccine will decide how much freedom of movement you’re allowed. The vaccine is the be-all and end-all and you will have this piped into your brains 24/7 from every direction. If you want your Social Security checks and Medicare, take the shot. If you want to see a movie or eat at a restaurant, take the shot. If you want to travel, take the shot. If you want out of your house, take the shot. If you want us to let you live at all, take the shot. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” was one of the funniest jokes we ever told you. So long and so many freedoms ago…

    Fighting a civil war about this suits us just fine. We have many more things we’d like to do to you as we get ready for the homeland calamity (not security) of the US dollar losing its reserve currency status. Unlike you beggars, we plan ahead. Many of you don’t even know where your next meal or tent encampment is coming from. We want this vaccine as bad as we wanted the Iraq War and if you don’t like it, you’re a traitor to health, freedom, old people and children — you are a pestilence that’s destroying our way of life. It feels really great to concentrate all of our problems on powerless little vermin like you. If you were gone, everything would be all right.

    Probably sacrificing a bunch of you will make this plague go away. Follow the science. It’s not like we’re superstitious witch doctors. Wear your mask in the restaurant when you walk to your table because the virus floats up there whether you’re seven feet tall or five feet tall — when you sit down at your table, take your mask off because the virus isn’t there. Basically, the virus likes you sitting down, lying down, shutting up, staying home, shooting up, obeying and making Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos richer. What’s good for them is good for you and what’s good for you is doing everything we say when we say it even if it contradicts something we said five minutes ago — beating you down and getting you mindless is where we want you.

    But the one true God is the vaccine. Take the poison, goddamn you. The Rev. Tony Fauci don’t know nothin’ about no gain of function research. Jesus, even people at Jonestown were more cooperative than you are. But we love you, we’re concerned about you. That’s why we prohibited millions of you from working and then watched you go broke, losing your jobs, homes and savings. That’s why we gave you Medicare for All. Oh, wait…

    Just take the shot, we’ve got all kinds of things in store for you if you don’t. We’ve only just begun to fight, doctors and nurses will be our armies, they will vanquish you, hospitals will be our castles and the drawbridges will be pulled up on you unvaccinated polluted rabble. And stop being paranoid and libelous about good people like us, we’re the best people, we are so superior to you, it’s infuriating that we even have to explain ourselves — you’d think that we’ve maimed and killed people with DES, Oraflex, Vioxx or the Swine Flu vaccine — or killed innocent women and children with reaper drones. Alarmist know-nothings!

    “Two weeks to flatten the curve…” If you were gone, everything would be all right. Hurry up and take the poison, goddam you. We have to make more progress. Tomorrow belongs to us!

    The post US: the Sickness Unto Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Terror Attacks in Kabul Suspiciously on Cue… Who Gains?

    Could an atrocity have been arranged by some of Baradar’s men at the request of the CIA?

    Three days before the bloody carnage at Kabul airport, CIA director William Burns held a secret meeting with a top Taliban commander in the Afghan capital. That is only one of several suspicious events this week in the countdown to the dramatic U.S. evacuation.

    At least 13 U.S. troops guarding an entrance to Kabul airport were killed in an apparent suicide bomb attack. Dozens of Afghans waiting in line for evacuation by military cargo planes were also killed. A second blast hit a nearby hotel used by British officials to process immigration documents.

    It was not the main ranks of the Taliban who carried out the atrocities. The militant group which swept into power on August 15 after taking over Kabul has ring-fenced the capital with checkpoints. The explosions occurred in airport districts under the control of the U.S. and British military.

    A little-known terror group, Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), claimed responsibility for the bombings. IS-K was barely reported before until this week when the U.S. and British intelligence services issued high-profile warnings of imminent terror attacks by this group at Kabul airport. Those warnings came only hours before the actual attacks. President Joe Biden even mentioned this new terror organization earlier this week and pointedly claimed they were “sworn enemies” of the Taliban.

    How is an obscure terror outfit supposed to infiltrate a highly secure area – past “sworn enemy” Taliban checkpoints – and then breach U.S. and British military cordons?

    How is it that U.S. and British intelligence had such precise information on imminent threats when these same intelligence agencies were caught completely flat-footed by the historic takeover of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15? When the Taliban swept into the capital it marked the collapse of a regime that the Americans and British had propped for nearly 20 years during their military occupation of Afghanistan. Could their intelligence agencies miss foreseeing such a momentous event and yet less than two weeks later we are expected to believe these same agencies were able to pinpoint an imminent atrocity requiring complex planning?

    What is the political fallout from the airport bombings? President Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are adamant that the evacuation from Kabul will be completed by the deadline on August 31. Biden said the atrocity underscores the urgency to get out of Afghanistan, although he threw in the token vow that “we will hunt down” the perpetrators.

    To be sure, the president is coming under intense political fire for capitulating against the Taliban and terrorists and for betraying Afghan allies. Some Republicans are demanding his resignation due to his overseeing a disaster and national disgrace. It is estimated that up to 250,000 Afghans who worked with the U.S. military occupation will be left behind and in danger of reprisal attacks.

    There seems a negligible chance that the deaths of 13 U.S. troops – the largest single-day killing of Americans in Afghanistan since a Chinook helicopter was shot down in August 2011 with 38 onboard – will provoke an extension of the Pentagon’s mission in the country. Even after the bombings this week, the Pentagon advised Biden to stick to the August 31 deadline. The Taliban have also stated that all U.S. and NATO troops must be out of the country by that date.

    Polls were showing that most Americans agreed with Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan – the longest war by the U.S. was seen as futile and unwinnable. The sickening bomb attacks this week will only underscore the public sense of war-weariness. Hawkish calls for returning large-scale forces to Afghanistan have little political resonance.

    This brings us back to the secret meeting earlier this week between the CIA’s William Burns and Taliban commander Abdul Ghani Baradar. The Washington Post reported that Biden sent Burns to meet with Baradar in Kabul. It was the most senior contact between the Biden administration and the Taliban since the latter’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15. The details of the discussion were not disclosed and some reports indicated other Taliban figures were not aware of the meeting.

    Baradar is one of the founding members of the Taliban. He was captured by Pakistan intelligence and the CIA in 2010. But at the request of the United States, Baradar was released from prison in 2018. Thereafter he led the Taliban in negotiations with the U.S. on finding an end to the conflict. Those talks culminated in a deal in February 2020 with the Trump administration agreeing to troop withdrawal this year. Biden has stuck to the pullout plan.

    From his career path, there is good reason to believe that Baradar is the CIA’s man inside the Taliban. Let’s say at least that he has the agency’s ear.

    Why else would CIA chief Burns meet Baradar at such a crucial time in the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan? To get Taliban assurances of security measures safeguarding American troops as they exit? That obviously didn’t happen.

    What else, then? Could an atrocity have been arranged by some of Baradar’s men at the request of the CIA? The objective being to shift focus from a shambolic, shameful retreat to one of necessity due to terror threats. It seems uncanny that U.S. and British intelligence services were warning of an event only hours before it happened in a way that was precisely predicted. The other consequence of benefit is that the droves of desperate Afghans queueing near Kabul airport are dispersed out of fear of more bloodshed. The beneficial optic is that U.S. and British military planes will take off on August 31 without the harrowing, pitiful scenes of Afghans running down the runway after them. Hence, the empire wraps up its bloody criminal war, with a little less shame than otherwise.

    The post Terror Attacks in Kabul Suspiciously on Cue… Who Gains? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghanistan:  The Abomination of “White Man’s Burden” and Fake Feminist Narratives

    Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
    Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need – new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
    Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.

    — Rudyard Kipling (1899)

    The 2011 UK census recorded that Asian groups together numbered roughly 7% of Britain’s population, Black people 3% and mixed-race 2%, making a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) total of 12%.  In various combinations they are the decedents of people who’ve once been owned, colonised, lost their lands, original culture, languages etc, and in modern societies have little or no collective institutional or financial power, to combat their ghettoisation in the lower reaches the UK class system.  The reason they are here, subject to western structural racism, is because the Tony Blairs of the 18th and 19th C slaughtered and enslaved their ancestors.  Throughout this period of the slavery and racist-imperialist gravy-train – and as Rudyard Kipling’s famous sentiments demonstrate – this oppression was represented as doing indigenous peoples some sort of service or favour.

    Elites abandoning the post-war decolonisation consensus in our era, returned to this racist faked foreign policy benevolence, force-feeding the public the narrative, that from intrusive Iraq, Afghanistan wars and elsewhere, ‘America is spreading democracy’.  The extent to which America is itself a democracy is up for debate, but this marketing is simply a rehash, of the 19th C ‘Onward march of western civilisation’ expansionist ideology. When asked, Ghandi is reputed to have mocked the notion of western civilisation saying ‘I think it would be a good idea’.

    Modern racist-imperialists – prominently Blair, his former ministers and his media enablers – blatantly reuse tropes of the same racist propaganda.  As the US project in Afghanistan grinds to a halt and tragedy overtakes the country, this propaganda practice has again gone into overdrive.  The BBC and most of the corporate media continue to re-spin the years of western domination of Afghanistan as about, educating its women and children.  In light of the new US withdrawal position, this is not just last year’s Orwell-like Ministry of Truth-style propaganda, but also a racist narrative that’s again hundreds of years old.  During the period of the 18th/19th C imperialist gravy-train, western conquest was similarly represented as ‘civilising the primitive savage’ and justified by narratives of supposedly ‘teaching the ‘w*gs/ darkies Christianity’.  Obscuring the slurs of implied ethnic primitivism from modern media presentation, hardly changes the truth of the material and ideological dynamic.

    The ‘educating Afghan women and children’ narrative would, as public discourse, be treated with the shocked incredulity it deserves, were indigenous Afghan casualties, from western conquest and occupation, not as a editorial agenda frequently media played down, effaced and censored from representation,   No matter how many Afghan mothers protest the western killing of their children, this phenomenon has been mainly absented from prominence in news agendas.

    When the UK Times unusually broke ranks reporting a 2009 US atrocity, it was left to campaigning scrutiny site Media Lens to follow up in 2010, writing… “American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed.”

    The extent of the problem meant in 2011 after a further nine children died in a NATO air strike, even President Karzai – an ambitious local politician in effect, simply a western satrap – was forced against potential self-interest, to embarrass General Petraeus publicly stating   “On behalf of the people of Afghanistan I want you to stop the killings of civilians” and the subsequent apology was “not enough”.   The France 24 news site covering Karzai’s statement, also referred to the similar indigenous 65 non-combatants killed during operations in Kunar province’s Ghaziabad district; six civilians killed in neighbouring Nangarhar province, and the hundreds who took to the streets of Kabul protesting the killing of children, all by western forces.

    The brutal Taliban shooting of Malala Yousafzai was used as a propaganda boost to the ‘advancing civilisation’ narrative by western media and political elites.  But it is perhaps significant that the Taliban who are hardly public relations sophisticates, felt they need only appeal to the lived experience of indigenous people in Afghanistan and the bordering area of Pakistan – in a 2013 response to the surviving Malala, publicly questioning…

    if you were shot but [by] Americans in a drone attack, would world have ever heard updates on your medical status? Would you be called ‘daughter of the nation’? Would the media make a fuss about you? Would General Kiyani have come to visit you and would the world media be constantly reporting on you?… Would a Malala day be announced?… More than 300 innocent women and children have been killed in drones attacks but who cares… (numbers unverified).

    Even career politician former President Karzai was similarly in line with grassroots experiences, after this year’s withdrawal announcement, telling Russia’s RT (UK) “The US has lost the war in Afghanistan…years ago, when it bombed Afghan homes”.  And that this western violence had recruited for the indigenous Afghan Taliban and enabled them. “Things went wrong. They (Taliban) began to re-emerge and the part of the population went with them.”

    Given that women and their children are most often the first victims of war, there has never been a significant grassroots pro-imperialism feminist movement.  In fact, in contrast to the attempts by pro-war neoliberals to camouflage their atrocities in the clothing of women’s concerns, a generational spanning tradition of anti-war feminists exists, including figures like Jane Adams, Ruth Adler, Vera Brittain, Betty Reardon, and Sylvia Pankhurst who opposed the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.  Current media spin about supposedly helping women in Afghanistan also deliberately side-lines significant figures like CodePink’s Medea Benjamin who recently commented…“A shout out to all who joined CODEPINK and other peace groups to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan. From Bush to Obama, we called for our troops to come home. Now we have to stop the military-industrial complex from dragging us into new wars.”

    Another issue is can altruism – particularly with regard to educating indigenous women and children – be remotely believed as a motivation for those responsible for the West’s conquest of Afghanistan? Education has been comodified in George W. Bush’s America, and resulting student debt is at record levels.  Similarly, in contradiction to previous UK Labour Party traditions, the governments comprising PM Tony Blair, Chancellor Gordon Brown and their cabinets abolished the mandatory student support grant and even introduced fees for what had previously been free education.  Consequently, the marketing of the state education policies of Blair et al were frequently parodied by Party grassroots supporters as instead ‘Exploitation, Exploitation, Exploitation’.  Blair’s New Labour cuts to lone parent benefits – primarily harming single mothers and their children – is frequently cited as the moment Labour’s traditional support realised they had been betrayed by neoliberal entryism.  Would Britain’s neoliberal political elite attacking domestic lone mothers and working-class opportunities, really expend financial resources just to help Afghan women and their children?

    Historian David Stannard has documented 100 million dead indigenous people of the Americas as victims of the largest holocaust in human history, occurring as a result of the overall conquest of the continent. For its part the US currently has a population of 331+ million people.  There are only 6+ million Native Americans left as part of this population, whose life chances are largely limited by the constraints of the Reservation system. Native Americans are practically un-findable, excluded, in most US cities, and invisible on film and TV.  If President George W Bush wanted to help indigenous people, he could have started at home.

    If Bush simply wanted to ‘do good’, given former manufacturing city powerhouses like Detroit are wastelands, suffering from the export of US manufacturing jobs to global sweatshop economies, he could have fought poverty and the resulting homelessness crisis.  Perhaps most significantly he could have tackled the economic underpinnings of the ongoing post-19th C Black human rights crisis.  Are then we really supposed to believe his US conquest of Afghanistan was about some sort of ‘white man’s burden’ altruism?

    In contradiction to the western white man’s burden narrative, both Bush and Blair presided over torture programs victimising Muslim people-of-colour.  One victim of the UK Blair torture regime – Fatima Boudchar – was actually pregnant when kidnapped along with her husband for rendition.  In Afghanistan torture was carried out at Bagram which corporate news outlets largely misrepresent as simply an airbase.  Most of the news outlets now pretending to be outraged by human rights concerns under the new Taliban, spun western torture under the entirely new invented term ‘water boarding’ as if it were akin to harmless surfing.  For decades prior to this it was simply known as a Nazi torture technique.  Not particularly a secret given it was represented even in popular film culture.  In Battle of the V1 (1959), a Polish female partisan subjected to Nazi water torture dies after her heart gives out.  In Circle of Deception (1960), it’s features, similarly used on a Canadian officer played by Bradford Dillman.  Yet, when the victims are simply Muslim people-of-colour, the status of the torture technique suddenly changes.

    So what are the real incentives behind the US-led conquest of Afghanistan?  On 9/11 the Pentagon and Twin Towers were attacked by 15 violent Sunni Whabbist Saudi Arabians and four other Muslims.  It was suggested that Saudi Whabbists had used the Afghanistan wilderness as a training ground.  The extent of cultural collusion between the Pashton Afghan Taliban and Whabbist Saudi Arabs is often disputed.  In any case Osama Bin Laden was found in neighbouring Pakistan.  The question is if you want to combat violent Saudi Arabian Whabbists, why not stop their export and go to source – Saudi Arabia itself? Saudi Arabia is not only the source of the 9/11 attackers but its appalling human rights on the oppression of women and judicial punishment arguably exceeds that of pre-invasion Afghanistan.  In fact, since 9/11 the US instead of dealing Saudi Arabia which coincidentally is also its long term regional ally and oil supplier, has attacked or militarily threatened numerous countries that either have nothing to do with the country, or even in ethnic terms have an adversarial relationship to the Saudis – among these predominantly Shia Iraq, Syria, Iran and Berber Libya.

    The approach Julian Assange and Wikileaks took to the issue in 2011 was to follow the money, and consequently put some flesh on the notion of a ‘Forever War’ that President Biden is currently citing in justifying US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

    The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.

    What Assange and Wikileaks are alluding to is a form of ‘Military Keynesianism’.  Keynesian economics originated as a method of circumventing the dictatorship of the marketplace, for societies to instead allocate value to things deemed socially functional – sometimes this is augmented by printing money to maintain particular activities. It was supposed to help society’s poor and working-class.  In our era it has been a way of redirecting money to the corporate rich – here particularly the military industries.  The money printing supporting this – like so many things – has been relabelled, and now termed ‘Quantitative Easing’, but condemned as Welfare or Socialism for the Rich by working-class activists.

    This is not the end of the incentives Afghanistan offers.  The corporate media are now suggesting the indigenous Afghan Taliban might be motivated by the country’s wealth in Lithium – vital for cell phone products – and Copper deposits.  Strange in two decades of coverage, it has never been suggested this was a motivation for the US to go halfway around the world.

    It is also worth looking at how Afghanistan fits into the entire Neo-Con agenda.  Globalised capitalism is very good at internalising its profits, while externalising its costs onto the general public and society at large.  Economically, globalised capitalism doesn’t’ actually work unless subsidised by unfeasible levels of fossil fuel supply at therefore unfeasible low cost levels.  The general public has to bear the social cost, the environmental cost, the cost of wars for oil and the potential national security cost of not having localised manufacturing production.

    In keeping with this and in contrast to any genuine post-9/11 agenda, US Neo-Con wars have predominantly had two functions – attacking oil rich and/or Russian allied nations.  It only takes a casual look at the regional map to show that a US military presence in Afghanistan provides a useful jumping off point for a war or simple military intimidation of Iran.  It also gives access to gas powerhouse Turkmenistan and potentially moves America’s military ever closer to Russia’s borders.  Predictably, despite Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, at no time during the US-led occupation did the corporate media query the military’s relationship to the country’s borders in the manner that they are doing now the indigenous Taliban are in charge.

    Fuel prices are close to record highs, something that is regarded as a detriment to global trade.  As Biden announced his intention to go through with the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, OPEC said they were willing to increase global supply.  Iran seeing the knife about to taken from its throat seemed believe they were about to be let back into the global oil market, and boasted of being able to boost production.  Israel contrived a dispute with Iran over a tanker, apparently believing that this might have a negative effect on any potential ongoing US/Iran negotiations, designed to bring the country in from the cold.

    If this conjunction plays-out the way it appears, then Biden ironically for equally capitalist materialistic and environmental hazardous reasons, is going to be the first prominent Democrat in decades, to open up clear blue water between himself and the Republican pro-war Neo-Con agenda, but at least hopefully we will be avoiding attacks on Iran and other future wars.

    In the meantime those like Tony Blair who have hitched their careers to the Neo-Con imperialist wagon train will continue to impotently stamp their rhetorical feet, while demanding that their ridiculous white saviour narrative be believed.  While aided and abetted by the BBC and corporate media, seemingly unaware they are doing last year’s Ministry of Truth propaganda, and repeating century old racisms.

    Afterword:

    In reaction to Tony Blair’s latest media temper tantrum, Peter Galbraith, former UN deputy special representative for Afghanistan, said:

    In terms of what was imbecilic, frankly it was the strategy that was followed for 20 years, which was to try to build a highly centralised state in a country that was as diverse – geographically and ethnically – as Afghanistan, and to engage in a counterinsurgency strategy without a local partner and the local partner was corrupt, ineffective, illegitimate.

    The post Afghanistan:  The Abomination of “White Man’s Burden” and Fake Feminist Narratives first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gavin Lewis.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Peace Movement Must Press For Diplomacy, Not More War, In Afghanistan

    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. Despite withdrawing the military, the US will continue to cause damage to Afghanistan if it doesn’t change course. That is unlikely to happen though unless the peace movement takes action to demand diplomacy, not war.

    The post The Peace Movement Must Press For Diplomacy, Not More War, In Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Will Americans Who Were Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored?

    Protest in Westwood, California 2002. Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

    America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place.

    That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years, in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars.

    While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly U.S. officials prepared to plunge our nation into graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

    Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted “…best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) at same time – not only UBL (Usama Bin Laden)… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

    So within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior U.S. officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

    Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the president to use military force “…against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons…”

    In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks.

    The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Barbara Lee of Oakland. Lee compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed, “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

    In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. Bush insisted Afghanistan must come first, but privately promised Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle that Iraq would be their next target.

    In the days after September 11, the U.S. corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed.

    But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR (National Public Radio) a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

    Clark: …do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 (sic) people?

    Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

    Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

    Ferencz:  We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

    Clark:  So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

    Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.

    The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Rep. Barbara Lee and Ben Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism.

    On September 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why we say no to war and hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and me (Medea). Our statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan.

    The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, wrote that, “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” I (Medea) wrote that ”a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.”

    Our analysis was correct and our predictions were prescient. We humbly submit that the media and politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of to lying, delusional warmongers.

    What leads to catastrophes like the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing anti-war voices but that our political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Barbara Lee, Ben Ferencz and ourselves.

    That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control U.S. politics on a bipartisan basis.

    In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that there are military “solutions” for them.

    Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of U.S. military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the U.S. post-Cold War “power dividend“.

    Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war-hawks when she confronted General Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

    As Secretary of State in Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal U.S. invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When U.K. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the illegality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

    In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand their control of U.S. foreign policy.

    But after spending trillions of dollars and killing millions of people, the abysmal record of U.S. war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait.

    Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic. So our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer but only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

    Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional U.S. political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia, and these trends are most pronounced among America’s long-time allies in Europe and in its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

    On October 19, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

    Now that dropping over 80,000 bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years has failed to change the way they live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live.

    We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

    Then we should  pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

    Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

     

    The post Will Americans Who Were Right on Afghanistan Still Be Ignored? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ​Afghanistan: So What Do the Filthy Commie Peaceniks Say Now?

    Afghan villagers stand over bodies of civilians during a protest in the city of Ghazni, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 29, 2019. An airstrike by U.S.-led forces in eastern Afghanistan killed at least five civilians. (AP Photo/Rahmatullah Nikzad)

    So, people get hurt when you stop waging wars, and peace is dangerous, and . . . and . . . well, women’s rights!

    What do the stupid peace lovers say now?

    Well, here’s what this one says:

    On September 11, 2001, I said, “Well, that proves all the weapons and wars are useless or counterproductive. Prosecute crimes as crimes, and start disarming.”

    When the U.S. government launched an illegal, immoral, sure to be catastrophic war on Afghanistan, I said, “That’s illegal and immoral and sure to be catastrophic! End it now!”

    When they didn’t end it, I said, “According to the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, there’s going to be hell when they end this, and it’s going to be a worse hell the longer it takes them to end it. So, end it now!”

    When they didn’t end it, I went to Kabul and met with all kinds of people and saw that they clearly had a lousy, corrupt, foreign-backed puppet government, with the looming threat of the Taliban, and neither choice was any good. “Support nonviolent civil-society,” I said. “Provide actual aid. Try democracy at home to lead by example. And (redundantly, since democracy at home would have done this) get the U.S. military the @%!%# out!”

    When they still didn’t end it, and when a Congressional investigation found the top two sources of income for the Taliban to be the revived drug trade and the U.S. military, I said “If you wait additional years or decades to get the !^%& out, there’s going to be no hope left. Get the hell out now!”

    When Amnesty International put ads up on bus stops in Chicago thanking NATO for the lovely war for women’s rights, I pointed out that bombs blow up women the same as men, and marched to protest NATO.

    I asked people in Afghanistan, and they said the same thing.

    When Obama pretended to get out, I said, “Really get out, you lying scheming fraud!”

    When Trump got elected promising to get out and then didn’t, I said, “Really get out, you lying scheming fraud!”

    (When Hillary Clinton failed to get elected, and evidence suggested that she’d have won had she credibly promised to end the wars, I said, “Do us all a favor and retire for godsake!”)

    When they STILL didn’t end it, I said, again, “According to the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, there’s going to be hell when they end this, and it’s going to be a worse hell the longer it takes them to end it. So, end it now!”

    When Biden pretended to get out while promising to keep troops there and to increase the bombings, I said, “Really get out, you lying scheming fraud!”

    I encouraged all the insiderish groups that said the same thing super gently and politely. I encouraged all the fed-up groups blocking doors and streets and weapons trains. I supported efforts in every country involved to get their token troops out and stop legitimizing a U.S. crime. Year after year after year.

    When Biden claimed the war was some sort of success, I pointed out how it had spread anti-U.S. terrorism across half the globe, spawned more wars, murdered countless people, devastated the natural environment, eroded the rule of law and civil liberties and self-governance, and cost trillions of dollars.

    When the U.S. government refused to abide by agreements, refused to stop bombing, refused to give credible negotiation or compromise a chance, refused to support the rule of law around the world or lead by example, refused to stop shipping weapons into the region, refused to even acknowledge that the Taliban is using U.S.-made weapons, but finally claimed it would get its troops out, I expected that U.S. media outlets would develop anew a strong interest in the rights of Afghan women. I was right.

    But the U.S. government, according to its own reporting, accounts for 66% of all the weapons exported to the least democratic quintile of nations on earth. Of the 50 most oppressive governments identified by a U.S.-government-funded study, the U.S. arms 82% of them. Here they are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Ethiopia, Gabon, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Oman, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen. Israel’s government, notorious for its violent oppression of Palestinian people, is not on that list (it’s a U.S.-funded list) but is the top recipient of “aid” funding for U.S. weapons from the U.S. government. Some women live in Palestine.

    The Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act (H.R.4718) would prevent U.S. weapons sales to other nations that are in violation of international human rights law or international humanitarian law. During the last Congress, the same bill, introduced by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, gathered a grand total of zero cosponsors.

    What do you notice about that list of nations? One of them, Afghanistan, was on the list of oppressive governments before the Taliban threatened to take it over. And the other 40 are of truly minimal interest to the U.S. corporate media, much less to any of the “BUT THE WOMEN!” crowd out there moaning in agony that a war might end.

    The same crowd seems to have no objection to the proposal moving through the U.S. Congress to force U.S. women at age 18 to register for a military draft that would force them against their will to kill and die in more of these wars.

    So, what would I propose that the U.S. government do for the women and men and children of Afghanistan now, regardless of horrible decisions in the past that it’s obviously too late to undo and just silly and offensive to rehash like this?

    1. Until it can reform itself into an entity capable of benevolent action, not a goddamned thing.

    2. Stop encouraging the Taliban to think that it can become a model U.S. client state in a few years if it’s mean and nasty enough, by ceasing to arm and train and fund brutal dictatorships all over the globe.

    3. Cease eroding the idea of the rule of law around the world by dropping opposition to the International Criminal Court and the World Court, by joining the International Criminal Court, and by eliminating the veto and democratizing the United Nations Security Council.

    4. Catch up with the world and cease being the leading holdout globally on the most major human rights treaties including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (every nation on Earth has ratified except the United States) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (every nation on Earth has ratified except the United States, Iran, Sudan, and Somalia).

    5. Move 20% of the U.S. military budget into useful things each year for five years.

    6. Move 10% of that rededicated funding into providing no-strings-attached aid and encouragement to the most law-abiding and honest-to-god small-d democratic poor nations on the planet.

    7. Take a hard look at the U.S. government itself, understand the powerful case that the U.S. government could make for bombing itself were it not itself, and take serious steps to remove the bribery from the election system, establish fair public funding and media coverage for elections, and remove gerrymandering, the filibuster, and as soon as possible the United States Senate.

    8. Free, apologize to, and thank every whistleblower who’s told us what the U.S. government was doing in Afghanistan for the past 20 years. Consider why we needed whistleblowers to tell us.

    9. Prosecute or free and apologize to every prisoner at Guantanamo, close the base, and get out of Cuba.

    10. Get out of the way of the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of Taliban crimes in Afghanistan, as well as its prosecution of crimes committed there by the Afghan government, and by the militaries of the United States and its junior partners.

    11. Swiftly become an entity that can credibly comment on horrors being committed by the Taliban, by — among other things — caring enough about the horrors coming to all of humanity to invest heavily in ending the destruction of the Earth’s climate and ending the existence of nuclear weapons.

    • First published at World Beyond War.org

    The post ​Afghanistan: So What Do the Filthy Commie Peaceniks Say Now? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Afghanistan:  Longest US War Continues to a New Stage

    The longest of the United States’ “forever wars” in Afghanistan was supposed to end August 31 after President Biden extended his predecessor’s withdrawal date from May of this year. But what will be ending is not clear; certainly not the imperial mission of the world’s superpower. If the US determines that it cannot impose its hegemony on that corner of the world through a compliant client state, it will opt for chaos instead.

    Puppeteer departs – puppet forces collapse

    In recent weeks, the Taliban military rapidly advanced, taking provincial capitals in Afghanistan and then the capital city of Kabul on August 15. The US-backed former President Ashraf Ghani fled the country in a helicopter packed with cash, the US embassy took down the stars-and-stripes, and Western governments evacuated personnel.

    In the leadup to the debacle, the US bombed a country, which has minimal air defenses, in a war that has cost at least 171,000 to 174,000 lives. Along with Qatar-based long-range B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers and AC-130 Spectre gunships, MQ-9 Reaper drones were deployed.

    While claiming it would end the war, the US had intended to continue to bomb Afghanistan at will and to keep private military contractors (i.e., mercenaries) there, along with some uniformed US and allied NATO troops such as those from Turkey. The New York Times conceded that: “Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.” All those plans are now being reevaluated.

    Even before the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, tens of thousands of Afghan refugees were slated to come to the US with Washington already releasing $300 million in the effort. Under the US Refugee Admissions Program, the former collaborators with the US occupation of their country will likely form a bastion of rightwing sentiment similar to the role that anti-Cuban Revolution refugees play in the US.

    The US had spent $2.3 trillion on the war and over twenty years building the Afghan Armed Forces. In a matter of days that army capitulated. Indications are that the clearly repressive religious extremist Taliban was not so much welcomed by most Afghans as much as the US and its NATO allies were rejected.

    Only a month ago, Biden confidently proclaimed a rout of the Afghan Armed Forces by the Taliban was impossible: “Because you have the Afghan troops that’s 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban.” Yet the Taliban with far fewer fighters, backed by no foreign power, and severely inferior in terms of equipment – never a commanding military force – prevailed because their adversary was so profoundly repugnant. They were natives, not occupiers.

    US as the midwife to the birth of the Taliban

    The antecedents of the Taliban date to the CIA-backed insurgency against the socialist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which was instituting modernization, emancipation of women, literacy, and land reform programs starting in 1978. The US war in Afghanistan is longer than just two decades. An extension of the old Cold War, the Afghanistan phase started with Ronald Reagan’s support of the mujahadeen “freedom fighters” back in the 1980s in a US jihad against the Soviet Union. And “the longest war” is continuing today with Joe Biden’s New Cold War.

    Back then, the Soviet Union was allied with the socialist government in Afghanistan. Soon Moscow was caught in a lose-lose situation of either allowing a nearby country to be subverted by the West or dispatching troops there to defend against a foreign-instigated insurgency. US President Carter’s National Security Advisor Brzezinski saw Afghanistan as a trap to get the US’s adversary into a Vietnam-like quagmire “to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible.” The cost of having Soviet troops on the ground in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 is believed to have contributed to the dissolution of the USSR.

    Various mujahideen elements backed by foreign powers, particularly the US coordinating with Pakistan, were used to overthrow the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992. In the following Afghan Civil War period, the Taliban arose in 1994 out of the contending mujahideen armies. By 1996, it had emerged triumphant against five rival mujahideen factions.

    From being a US ally and asset, the Taliban became the enemy in 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan was somewhat speciously justified with allegations that under Taliban rule the country had harbored terrorists and had links to al-Qaida. More to the point, the long occupation of Afghanistan was a projection of US military capacity into central Asia. Especially after the Islamic Revolution in Iran overthrew the US client regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the US needed military and surveillance bases close to the belly of Russia and China.

    Restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the prospects of chaos

    With the seizure of Kabul by the Taliban just days ago, the prospect of a nation ruled under strict Sharia law with brutal penalties for noncompliance is chilling. Interference in Afghanistan by the US was never motivated by its abhorrence to fundamentalist theocracies or the Taliban’s repulsive record on women’s rights, as evidenced by Washington’s fawning treatment of the Saudi dictatorship.

    The Taliban is primarily drawn from the Pushtun ethnic group, which comprises nearly half of the Afghan population. However, the Taliban does not have consolidated support among other ethnic groups, especially in the north, or even within the Pushtun population. One of the poorest countries in the world with one of the highest birth rates, Afghanistan faces rampant COVID, drug addiction, and food shortages. Further, the Taliban lacks the experience for national rule and is not popular outside their rural bases, making for an extremely volatile situation.

    It is not clear what the US role will be now regarding Afghanistan. The precipitous US retreat may not mean a complete defeat; timing should not be confused with the substance. The US could still reach a new accommodation with the Taliban to further US strategic and economic interests, while exploiting the Taliban’s brand of Sunni zealotry to destabilize nearby Shi’ite Iran, Russia with its Chechnya insurgency, and China with its Uyghur insurgency.

    Both China and Russia have officially met with the Taliban in the last month precisely to try to forestall the exportation of extremist Islamic insurgency within their borders. Also in July, representatives from the Taliban and the Afghan government were hosted in Tehran, and Iran remains “cautiously open” to the new government in Kabul with whom they share a 572-mile border.

    Chaos in Afghanistan with the prospect of disorder spilling over regionally, while perhaps not the preferred option for the US, could have the advantage for the US imperial project of derailing development initiatives in Russia and especially China with its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative extending into Afghanistan. In a not unsimilar situation after the US was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, Brzezinski claimed he encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot and the Thai to help the Khmer Rouge.

    Afghanistan is now in far worse a condition than before the US invasion. Afghanistan is the world’s leading source of illicit drugs, followed by the US client state of Colombia. Under US occupation, Afghanistan became the “world’s first true nacro-state.”

    While the current military advances of the Taliban look like defeats for the US imperial project, this is not the same as a victory for the WAfghans whose progressive secular government, the socialist Democratic Republic, was quashed three decades ago. Once again, the US empire offers the world a binary choice between submission to its “rules-based order,” where the US makes the rules and disregards international law, or chaos.

    Meanwhile inside the beltway and beyond, recriminations about US policy failures in Afghanistan are being hurled in all directions. US President George H. W. Bush’s 1991 obituary on the US people’s objection to endless imperial war – “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” – may yet prove to be premature.

    The post Afghanistan:  Longest US War Continues to a New Stage first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Wounded Paternalism: Biden and the US Imperial Complex

    Civilisation has tended to be seen like a gift by those claiming to grant it.  It is done, in the sense Rudyard Kipling intended it, with solemn duty.  It is a task discharged as a burden borne heavily.  In its modern form, notably in the hands of the US, it comes with fast food, roads, schools and blue chip stocks.  Civilisation, in this context, is also unsolicited, imposed upon a country, whether they would wish it to be.  Autonomy comes into it superficially: the custodianship of a puppet regime, often rapacious.

    The results of such unsolicited gifts are there to be seen by the proclaimed civilisers who eventually leave, of which Afghanistan is simply another example.  They create classes and groups of citizens who risk being compromised by the forces that seize power. They cause discord and disruption to local conditions.

    When the paternalism of civilisation’s builders goes wrong, the only ones blamed are those who either did not understand it, or ignored its beneficent properties.  This was the implication in the August 16 speech by President Joseph Biden.  To be fair, Biden had never believed in a “counterinsurgency or nation building” mission to begin with.  Being in Afghanistan had, in his mind, only one purpose: counterterrorism.  And the threat had changed, “metastasized” to include a global consortium of challenges: al-Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, the efforts of ISIS.

    While the speed of the Taliban’s advance had surprised the president, he noted those Afghan “political leaders” who “gave up and fled the country.”  The US-armed Afghan military had “collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”  All of this provided firm reassurance to him “that ending US military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.”  US troops “cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

    An acknowledgment was also made about the money, training and material provided – those attributes of imperial supply – to local soldiers who simply would not pull their weight.  “We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong – incredibly well equipped – a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.”  Such a picture of ingratitude!

    The paternalists, stricken by a misplaced sense of duty of care, insist that more must be done to save personnel who worked for Coalition forces and Afghans who served their projects.  Washington’s allies have been scolding, accusing Biden of not carrying the standard of Western values high enough, let alone long enough.  Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign relations committee, assessed the withdrawal as fundamentally damaging “to the political and moral credibility of the West.”  These were “bitter events” for the believers “in democracy and freedom, especially for women”.

    German politicians had gone so far as to see the mission in Afghanistan in moral terms.  It was meant to be an invasion without those historically militarist overtones that had characterised previous uses of German military strength.  “The security of the Federal Republic of Germany,” declared former Defence Minister Peter Struck in justifying the troop presence, “is also being defended in the Hindu Kush.”

    Tom Tugendhat, Conservative chair of the UK parliament’s foreign affairs committee, put a touch of Britannic gloss on the episode, using all the themes that come with benevolent, and eventually departing, empire.  “Afghanistan is the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez.  We need to think again about how we handle friends, who matters and how we defend our interests.”

    In the US itself, the worried paternalists on the Hill are many.  Democratic Senators Bob Menendez of New Jersey, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire have women’s rights on their mind.  In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, the signed parties “strongly” urged the creation of “a humanitarian parole category especially for women leaders, activists, human rights defenders, judges parliamentarians, journalists, and members of the Female Tactical Platoon of the Afghan Special Security Forces and to streamline the paperwork process to facilitate referrals to allow for fast, humane, and efficient relocation to the United States.”

    For these worried souls, the demonic Taliban is responsible for war crimes, summary executions, public beatings and flogging of women, sexual violence and forced marriage, as well as a press “clampdown”.  There is no mention of a restoration of order, the reining in of banditry, and the protection of property.  Their version of the Afghan conflict is one resolutely cockeyed.

    Shaheen of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees issued a plea to Biden for “swift, decisive action” lest Afghan civilians “suffer or die at the hands of the Taliban.”  Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton chastised the leaders from both parties who refused to go on with the occupation.  They had “failed to hold the votes for re-authorizing this conflict for the last two decades since we invaded to find Osama bin Laden.  For that, all of us in Congress should be ashamed.”

    The subtext to all of this: we should be telling the Afghans what to do, how to sort out squabbles and how to march to the beat of our nation-building tune.  Like fans of the deceptively named “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, it is left to powerful states to determine the conditions under which such responsibility is determined, and when the gift of civilisation shall be provided.  The line between the duty to protect and the idea of might is right is not only crossed but rubbed out altogether.

    Amidst the warnings, pleas and bleeding heart urgings, the apologists ignore that the mission civilisatrice in Afghanistan came with its own barbarisms: atrocities, torture, the use of drones and an assortment of devilishly lethal weapons.  But these were seen as a necessary toll.  The events unfolding over the last few days should be offering US lawmakers and Washington’s allies firm lessons.  These promise to be ignored.

    The post Wounded Paternalism: Biden and the US Imperial Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Calling Out The Greatest Culprit Behind The Climate Crisis

    Abby Martin and Mike Prysner of The Empire Files are producing a new feature-length documentary that exposes the US military as “Earth’s Greatest Enemy.” Left out of the conversation about the climate crisis is the fact that even if every person, vehicle and factory stopped emitting carbon, as long as the US military continues on as it is, the earth will still be headed for disaster. Clearing the FOG speaks with war and climate journalist Dahr Jamail and Mike Prysner about the state of the climate crisis, the extent of environmental destruction caused by the military both in the United States and abroad and the new film project. You can learn more at earthsgreatestenemy.com. 

    The post Calling Out The Greatest Culprit Behind The Climate Crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Opening And Closing US Embassies-From Sierra Leone To Afghanistan

    While the people of Afghanistan are in a state of fear of the Taliban who now control Afghanistan, its capital, major cities and countryside after the U.S. and NATO occupation of twenty years, please pardon my personal observances of some of my experiences during sixteen years in the U.S. diplomatic corps and opening and closing U.S. Embassies in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan and the effects on the civilian populations of the countries involved.

    In December 2001, I was a part of a very small team from the U.S. Department of State that was sent to Kabul, Afghanistan to reopen the U.S. Embassy.  The Embassy had been closed for 12 years following the Soviet exodus from Afghanistan and the subsequent civil war between the warlord militias that fought to gain land and influence. 

    The post Opening And Closing US Embassies-From Sierra Leone To Afghanistan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.