Afghanistan: The Other Lost War

by Stephen Lendman

In his important new book Freedom Next Time, dealing
with “empire, its facades and the enduring struggle of
people for their freedom,” John Pilger has a chapter
on Afghanistan.  In it he says that “Through all the
humanitarian crises in living memory, no country has
been abused and suffered more, and none has been
helped less than Afghanistan.”  He goes on to describe
what he sees as something more like a moonscape than a
functioning nation.  In the capitol, Kabul, there are
“contours of rubble rather than streets, where people
live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims
waiting for rescue….(with) no light or heat.”  It
seems like it’s always been that way for these
beleaguered people who’ve had a long history of
conflict and suffering with little relief.  In the
19th century, the Afghan people were victimized by the
“Great Game” struggle pitting the British empire
against Tsarist Russia for control of that part of the
world.  More recently in the 1980s, it paid dearly
again when a US recruited mujahideen guerrilla army
battled against a Soviet occupation.  It forced the
occupiers out but at the cost of a ravaged country and
one forced to endure still more suffering and
destruction from the brutal civil war in the 1990s
that followed the Soviet withdrawal.  Then came 9/11,
the US attack, invasion, occupation and further
devastation that’s ongoing with no end in sight and
now intensifying in ferocity.

In his book, Pilger explains that Afghanistan today is
what the CIA once called Vietnam - “the grand illusion
of the American cause.”  There’s no assured safety
even in most parts of the capitol now where for a
brief time after the US invasion the people of Kabul
enjoyed a degree of freedom long denied them by the
Taliban.  Now there’s neither freedom nor safety
almost anywhere in the country as the brutal regional
“warlords” rule most parts of it, and the Taliban have
begun a resurgence reigniting the conflict that for a
time subsided.  Today the nation is once again a war
zone and narco-state with the “warlords” and drug
kingpins controlling everything outside the capitol
and the Taliban gaining strength and fighting back in
the south trying to regain what they lost.  In Kabul
itself, the country’s selected and nominal president
Hamid Karzai (a former CIA asset and chief consultant
to US oil giant UNOCAL) is a caricature of a man and
willing US stooge who functions as little more than
the mayor of the city.  Outside the capitol he has no
mandate or support and wouldn’t last a day on his own
without the round the clock protection afforded him by
the US military and the private contractor DynCorp.

When they ruled most of the country in the 1990s, the
Taliban at least kept order and wouldn’t tolerate
banditry, rape or murder, despite their
ultra-puritanical ways and harsh treatment of the
disobedient.  They also virtually ended opium
production.  Now all that’s changed.  The US - British
invasion in 2001 ended the ban on opium production,
allowed the “warlords” to replant as much of it as
they wanted, and the result according to a report
released by the UN is that cultivation of this crop is
spiraling out of control.  Antonio Maria Costa, the UN
anti-drug chief, said this year’s opium harvest will
be a record 6,100 tons (enough to make 610 tons of
heroin) or 92% of the total world supply and 30% more
than the amount consumed globally.  Costa went much
further in his comments saying southern Afghanistan
“display(s) the ominous hallmarks of incipient
collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and
trafficking, insurgency and terrorism, crime and
corruption (because) opium cultivation is out of
control.” He directed his comments at President Karzai
for not acting forcefully to deal with the problem
saying provincial governors and police chiefs should
be sacked and held to account.  He also accused
government administrators of corruption.

The reason why this is happening is that elicit drug
trafficking is big business with an annual UN estimate
gross of around $400 - 500 billion or double the sales
revenue from legal prescription drugs the US
pharmaceutical giants reported in 2005.  Those
profiting from it include more than the “kingpins” and
organized crime.  The elicit trade has long been an
important profit center for many US and other banks
including the giant international money center ones.
It’s also well-documented that the CIA has been
involved in drug-trafficking (directly or indirectly)
throughout its half century existence and especially
since the 1980s and the Contra wars in Nicaragua.
Today the CIA is partnered with the Afghan “warlords”
and criminal syndicates in the huge business of
trafficking heroin.  It guarantees the crime bosses
easy access to the lucrative US market and the CIA a
large and reliable revenue stream to augment its
annual (heretofore secret) budget disclosed by Mary
Margaret Graham, Deputy Director of National
Intelligence for Collection, to be $44 billion in
2005.

Why the US Attacked and Invaded Afghanistan

The now famous (or infamous) leaked Downing Street (or
smoking-gun) memo on the secret July, 2002 UK Labor
government meeting discussed how the Bush
administration “wanted to remove Saddam, through
military action (and) had no patience with the UN
route.  (So to justify it) the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy.”  It doesn’t get
much clearer than that, and the high UK official
(Richard Dearlove, head of British intelligence MI6)
had to know as he sat in on the high-level secret
meetings in Washington at which the plan was
discussed.  So to help out in serious damage-control,
the US corporate media, in its customary
empire-supportive role, either called the document a
fake or ignored it altogether.  It was no fake, and as
such, got front page coverage in the European press
after the Rupert Murdoch-owned London Sunday Times
broke the story in their online edition on May 1,
2005.

The US war on Afghanistan was also planned well in
advance (at least a year or more) of the 9/11 attack
that provided the claimed justification for it.  It
was part of the US strategic plan to control the vast
oil and gas resources of Central Asia that former
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski under
President Carter explained the importance of in his
1997 book The Grand Chessboard.  In it he referred to
Eurasia as the “center of world power extending from
Germany and Poland in the East through Russia and
China to the Pacific and including the Middle East and
Indian subcontinent.”  By dominating this region
including Afghanistan with its strategic location, the
US would assure it had access to and controlled the
vast energy resources there. 

Early on the US was very willing to work with the
Taliban believing their authoritarian rule would bring
stability to the country without which any plan would
be in jeopardy.  Their religious extremism, harsh
treatment of women and the disobedient, and overall
human rights abuses were of no concern and never are
anywhere else despite the pious rhetoric from
Washington to the contrary.  It was only in 1999 when
the Taliban failed to stabilize the areas they
controlled and negotiations broke down trying to
convince them to bow to US interests that official
policy changed and the decision was made to remove
them.  Initially the plan to do it was to be a joint
US - Russia operation, and at the time, meetings were
held between US officials and those from Russia and
India to discuss what kind of government should be
installed.  The US needs stability in Afghanistan and
control of the country for the oil and gas pipelines
it wants built from the landlocked Caspian Basin to
warm water ports in the south.  It wants them gotten
there through Pakistan and Afghanistan as the prime
transhipment route to avoid having them cross Russia
or Iran.

September 11, 2001 provided the US with the pretext it
needed to begin the war it intended to wage using
whatever reason it decided to pick to justify it.  It
began a scant four weeks later on October 7 as a joint
US - British intensive aerial assault against a
country unable to put up any kind of defense against
it.  It then ended a second scant 5 weeks after that
on November 12 when the Taliban fled from Kabul
allowing the Northern Alliance forces the US had
recruited to replace them to enter the city the
following day. 

The intense but brief conflict came at an enormous
cost to the Afghan people already devastated by the
effects of almost endless war and internal turmoil for
over two decades.  It displaced as many as about six
million or more people fleeing to neighboring
countries or becoming internally displaced persons and
being categorized as IDPs.  About half to two-thirds
of those refugees have now returned home but most are
unable to find much relief from where they’d been.
Refugees International interviewed returnees to Kabul
in 2002, where conditions are much more stable than
elsewhere, and learned that while people were happy to
be back they found conditions there to be terrible -
no shelter, no schools, no work, no medical care, no
security, and for many little or no food. 

Things are no better today, and according to UK-based
Christian Aid are likely to become worse.  It recently
assessed conditions in 66 villages in the west and
northwest of the country and learned millions of
Afghans face hunger because because draught caused
complete crop failures in the worst hit areas.  It
reported people are already going hungry and without
considerable aid famine is a real possibility.  Things
are all the harder because the internal conflict
resumed beginning with the resurgent Taliban
(discussed below) that began slowly in late 2002, grew
significantly by mid-2003 and has been building in
intensity since.

It all began with the US-led attack on Afghanistan
that from the start took a great toll in injuries and
deaths, mostly affecting innocent civilians.  Marc
Herold of the University of New Hampshire estimated
between 3,100 - 3,600 deaths resulted from the 5 week
conflict or as many as over 600 more than those killed
on 9/11 in the US which was the pretext used to go to
war.  Herold continues estimating deaths and injuries
to Afghans and occupying forces since and believes as
of July, 2004 about 12,000 Afghan troops and civilians
have been killed in the conflict and about 32,000
seriously injured.  As things have intensified since,
those numbers increase daily and are now considerably
higher but it’s not known to what level.  And what’s
not included in any of the estimates is the many
unknown number of thousands who’ve died since October,
2001 from the crushing poverty causing starvation and
disease.

US “Liberation” Brought No Relief              
                   

For a brief time after mid-November, 2001, the Afghan
people were free from the repression forced on them
under Taliban rule, but what replaced them was no
improvement nor did the US “liberator” intend it to
be.  The US-installed so-called Northern Alliance is
terminology used to identify the United Islamic Front
for the Salvation of Afghanistan that prior to October
7, 2001 controlled less than one-third of the country.
They never were in the past or were they to be now
the “salvation” of anything but their own
self-interest.  The Alliance is comprised of about
five dominant mujahideen factions each led by a
thugish “warlord” ruling over a band of murderers,
brutes and rapists whose criminal acts Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch have condemned. 

As a result, the brief respite from conflict the
Afghan people enjoyed was short-lived under their new
rulers.  With them back in charge in the regions their
respective “warlords” controlled, murder, rape and
mayhem became common again as it was under their
previous rule that gave rise to the Taliban in the
first place.  So while the Taliban initially faded
away after mid-November, 2001, defenseless against the
US-led onslaught against them, growing anger and
discontent with the present rule has allowed them to
regroup and begin a campaign of resurgence.  That
campaign is gaining strength and looking more all the
time like it may turn Afghanistan into a Central Asian
version of the conflict in Iraq that cooler civilian
heads in Washington and at the Pentagon know is out of
control, a lost cause and only will end when the
occupation does under a future US administration.  The
Bush administration, that’s usually wrong but never in
doubt, makes it clear it will “stay the course” and
not “cut and run.” 

Conditions In Afghanistan Today

Life in Afghanistan today is surreal.  In parts of
Kabul an opulent elite has emerged many of whom have
grown rich from rampant corruption and drug
trafficking, and the city actually has an upscale
shopping area catering to them offering for sale
specialty products like expensive Swiss watches and
other luxury goods.  They can be found at the Roshan
Plaza shopping mall and Kabul City Center plaza that
has three floors of heated shops, a cappuccino bar and
the country’s first escalator.  The rutted streets are
locked down and deserted at night, but during the day
luxury jeeps and four-wheel drive limousines are seen
on them.  There are also upscale hotels including the
five-star Serena, built and run by the Aga Khan
Development Network (AKDN), offering luxury
accommodations for visiting dignitaries, Western
businessmen and others able to afford what they cost
in an otherwise impoverished city still devastated by
years of conflict and destruction.  The arriviste
class there can, mansions are being built for them,
foreign branch banks are there to service their needs,
and an array of other amenities are there to
accommodate their extravagant tastes and wishes.  In a
country where drug trafficking is the leading industry
and corruption is systemic, there’s a ready market for
those able to afford most anything, even in a place as
unlikely as Afghanistan.

There’s also a ready market provided by the array of
well-off foreign ex-pats, a well-cared for NGO
community (with their own guest houses for their
staff), colonial administrators, commercial
developers, mercenaries, fortune-hunters, highly-paid
enforcers and assorted other hangers-on looking to
suck out of this exploited country whatever they can
while they’re able to do it.  So far at least, there’s
nothing stopping them except the threat of angry and
desperate people ready to erupt on any pretext and the
growing resistance gaining strength and support from
the resurgent Taliban.  There’s also no shortage of
alcohol in a fundamentalist Muslim country where it’s
not allowed, high-priced prostitutes are available on
demand with plenty of ready cash around to buy their
services, a reported 80 brothels operate in the city,
and imported Thai masseuses are at the luxury Mustafa
Hotel where the owner is called a Mr. Fix It, an
Internet Cafe is located on the bottom floor offering
ethernet and wireless connectivity, and the restaurant
fare ranges from traditional Afghan to steaks, pizza
and “the best burger in all of Kabul.”  The
impoverished local population would surely not be
amused or pleased comparing their daily plight to the
luxury living afforded the elite few able to afford
it.  Their city is in ruins, and desperation, neglect,
despair and growing anger characterize their daily
lives.

This Potemkin facade of opulence doesn’t represent
what that daily life is like in the city and
throughout the country for the vast majority of the
approximate 26 million or so Afghans.  For them life
is harsh and dangerous, and they show their
frustration and impatience in their anger ready to
boil over on any pretext.  As in Iraq, there’s been
little reconstruction providing little relief from the
devastation and making what work there is hard to find
and offering little pay.  The result makes depressing
reading:

—Unemployment is soaring at about 45% of those
wanting work.

—The half of the working population getting it earns
on average about a meager $200 a year or a little over
$300 for those involved in the opium trade which is
the main industry in the country.

—The poverty overall is overwhelming and about
one-fourth of the population depends on scarce and
hard to find food aid creating a serious risk of
famine.

—The life expectancy in the country at 44.5 years is
one of the lowest in the world.

—The infant mortality rate is the highest in the
world at 161 per 1,000 births

—One-fifth of children die before age five.

—An Afghan woman dies in childbirth every 30
minutes.

—In Kabul alone an estimated 500,000 people are
homeless or living in makeshift and deplorable
conditions.

—Only one-fourth of the population has access to
safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

—Only one doctor is available per 6,000 people and
one nurse per 2,500 people.

—100 or more people are killed or wounded each month
by unexploded ordnance.

—Children are being kidnapped and sold into slavery
or murdered to harvest their organs that bring a high
price.

—Less than 6% of Afghans have access to electricity
available only sporadically.

—Women’s literacy rate is about 19%, and schools are
being burned in the south of the country and teachers
beheaded in front of their students. 

—Many women are also forced to beg in the streets or
turn to prostitution to survive.

In addition, lawlessness is back, Sharia law has been
reinstated, the internal conflict has resumed, and no
one is safe either from the country’s warring factions
or from the hostile occupying force making life
intolerable for the vast majority of the Afghan
people.

Afghanistan, Inc. - The Lucrative Business of
War-Profiteering

Those wondering why the US engages in so many
conflicts (aside from the geopolitical reasons) and is
always ready for another might consider the fact that
wars are so good for business.  Corporate America,
Wall Street and large insider investors love them
because they’re so profitable.  It shows up noticeably
on the bottom line of all contractors the Bush
administration choose to “rebuild” Iraq and
Afghanistan.  It’s also been a bonanza for the many
consultants, engineers and mercenaries working for
them who can pocket up to $1,000 a day compared to
Afghan employees lucky to earn $5 for a day’s work
when they can find it.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, huge open-ended, no-bid
contracts amounting to many billions of dollars were
awarded to about 70 US firms including the usual array
of politically connected ones whose names have now
become familiar to many - Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons,
Shaw Group, SAIC, CH2M Hill, DynCorp, Blackwater, The
Louis Berger Group, The Rendon Group and many more
including the one that nearly always tops the list,
Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and
Root. Since 2001, this arguably best-connected of all
war-profiteers was awarded $20 billion in war-related
contracts the company then exploited to the fullest by
doing shoddy work, running up massive cost-overruns
and then submitting fraudulent billings.

Halliburton and other contractors have managed to
build permanent military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan
for the Pentagon and prisons to house and torture
whomever US authorities choose to arrest and for
whatever reason.  But their work is nothing short of
shoddy and sloppy when it comes to assessing the job
they’ve done rebuilding both countries.  In Iraq
Halliburton did such a poor job repairing the
country’s oil fields the US Army estimates it’s cost
the country $8 billion in lost production.  It also
botched the simple job of installing metering systems
at ports in southern Iraq to assure oil wasn’t being
smuggled out of the country.

No Serious US-Directed Effort To Rebuild Two War-Torn
Countries

Far more important for most Iraqis and Afghans,
there’s been no serious effort to rebuild these
war-torn countries across the board.  That effort is
desperately needed to restore the essential
infrastructure destroyed in both conflicts like power
generating stations and water and sewage facilities,
but the funding for them has been poorly directed,
lost in a black hole of corruption or wasted because
of inefficiency, design flaws, construction errors or
deliberate unwillingness to do much more than hand out
big contracts to US chosen companies then able to
pocket big profits while doing little for the people
in return for them.  It also shows in the state of the
countries’ basic facilities like schools, health
clinics and hospitals that are in deplorable condition
with little being done to improve them despite lofty
promises otherwise.  One example is the US pledge of
$17.7 million in 2005 for education in Afghanistan
that turned out, in fact, to be for a private
for-profit American University of Afghanistan only
available to Afghans who can afford its cost - meaning
none of them but the privileged few.

It’s clear the US occupier has no interest in helping
the people it said it came to “liberate” unless by
“liberate” it meant from their freedom to be able to
exploit and abuse them in service to the interests of
capital which is all the Bush administration ever has
in mind.  Just as Iraq has the misfortune of having a
vast oil reserve beneath its sand the US wants to
control, so too Afghanistan happens to be
strategically located as part of a prime transhipment
route over which the Caspian Basin’s great oil and gas
reserves can be transported by pipeline to the warm
water southern ports the US wants to ship it out from
to countries it will allow it to be shipped to.  These
are the reasons the US invaded both countries, and
that’s why no serious effort is being made to do any
reconstruction or redevelopment to help the people.
There are also reports, unconfirmed for this article,
that hydrocarbon reserves have been discovered in the
northeast of Afghanistan amounting to an estimated 1.5
billion barrels of oil and from 15 - 30 trillion cubic
feet of natural gas.  If this proves accurate, it will
be one more curse for the Afghan people who already
have an unbearable number of others to deal with.

There isn’t likely to be relief for them in
reconstruction or anything else as long as the US
occupies the country and remains its de facto ruler.
It’s sole funding priority (besides what it ignores
lost to corruption) is to its chosen contractors and
the bottom line boosting profits they get from being
on the corporate welfare dole.  A revealing window
into this and how reality diverges from rhetoric is
seen in a June, 2005 report by the well-respected
Johannesburg based NGO Action Aid.  It documents what
it calls phantom aid that’s pledged by the US and
other countries but never shows up.  At most, maybe
40% of it does while the rest never leaves the home
country.  It goes to pay so-called American “experts”
who overprice their services but provide ineffective
“technical assistance” for it.  It also obliges
recipient countries to buy US products and services
even when cheaper and more accessible ones are
available locally.  The report goes on to accuse the
US to be one of the two greatest serial offender
countries (France being the other one) with 70% of
what it calls aid requiring receiving countries to get
from US companies (and much of that is for US-made
weapons) and that 86% of all the US pledges turn out
to be phantom aid.  So, in fact, so-called US donor
aid to rebuild a war-torn country is just another scam
to enrich politically-connected American corporations
by developing new export markets for them.  Iraq,
Afghanistan and other recipient countries get nothing
more than the right to have their nations, resources,
and people exploited by predatory US corporations as
one of the spoils of war or one-way trade agreements.

All of this has caused deep-seated mostly repressed
anger that erupted in Kabul this past May in the worst
street violence seen in the capitol since the fall of
the Taliban in 2001.  It happened after a US military
truck speeding recklessly smashed into about a dozen
civilian vehicles at a busy intersection killing five
people in the collision.  It touched off mass rioting
in angry protest against an already hated occupier
with crowds of men and boys shouting “death to
America, death to Karzai” and blaming the government
and US military for what happened.  People set fires
to cars, shops, restaurants and dozens of police
posts.  They also attacked buildings and clashed with
US forces and Afghan police on the scene throwing
rocks at their vehicles.  US troops responded by
opening fire on unarmed civilians killing at least 4
and leaving many others injured.  When it finally
ended, eight people were reported dead and 107
injured.  This uprising in the Kabul streets showed
the great anger and frustration of the people breaking
out in mass rage in response to one dramatic incident
that symbolized for them everything gone wrong in the
country now under an unwanted occupier, the oppressive
US-installed Northern Alliance “warlord” rule, and the
deprivation of the people suffering greatly as a
result.  There’s no end of this in sight, and it’s
almost certain the resistance will only intensify in
response as it’s now doing.

Growing Resistance Against Repression and War Crimes

Like the mythological phoenix rising from the ashes,
the Taliban have capitalized on the turmoil and
discontent and have reemerged to reclaim most parts of
southern Afghanistan.  This part country has long been
ungovernable and is known as an area too dangerous
even for aid agencies.  The Taliban now openly control
some districts there, have set up shadow
administrations in others, and have moved into the
province of Logar located just 25 miles from Kabul
where they have easy access to the capitol.  For the
British who know their history, it should be no
surprise.  Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor
of North West Frontier Province in bordering Pakistan
spoke of it when he said: “Unlike other wars, Afghan
wars become serious only when they are over.”  Surely
the former Soviet occupiers also could have told
George Bush in 2001 what he’d be up against.  The
Brits could have as well.

The Taliban are now gaining supporters among the
people fed up with the misery inflicted on them by the
US and multinational force invaders and the Northern
Alliance rule that’s even more repressive than the
Taliban were during their years in power.  It led to
their 1990s rise and conquest of over two-thirds of
the country in the first place.  It happened in the
wake of the vacuum created in the country following
the withdrawal of the defeated Soviet forces.  During
the decade-long conflict while they were there, the
Afghan resistance fought the West’s war with its
funding and arms.  It was heroic and the darling of
the US media.  But once the war ended and the Soviet
Union collapsed, Afghans were abandoned and left on
their own to deal with the ravages of their war-torn
country and the chaos of warlordism and civil war that
erupted in its aftermath.  Out of that despair and
with considerable aid from Pakistan, the Taliban
fighters emerged and by 1996 had defeated the
competing warlords to control most of the country. 

Today it looks like de jeva vu all over again as many
Afghans apparently prefer Taliban rule again they see
as the lesser of the only choices they now have.  The
result is that daily violence has erupted into a
growing catastrophic resistance guerrilla war, slowly
becoming more like the one in Iraq, that’s
intensifying and making the country unsafe and
ungovernable.  It’s led the international policy
Senlis Council think tank, that does extensive
monitoring of Afghanistan, to issue a damning report
called: Afghanistan Five Years Later: The Return Of
The Taliban.  The report blamed the occupying forces
for doing nothing to address the crushing poverty,
failing to achieve stability and security, and claims
Afghanistan “is falling back into the hands of the
Taliban (and their) frontline now cuts halfway through
the country encompassing all of the southern
provinces” (that have)  limited or no central
government control.”  Emmanuel Reinert, Executive
Director, concluded “The Taliban community are winning
control of Afghanistan (and) the international
community is progressively losing control of the
country.”  He added that Afghanistan today is a
humanitarian disaster, and that there’s a hunger
crisis with children starving in makeshift
unregistered refugee camps because of lack of donor
interest.

It’s fueling the Taliban guerrilla resistance that’s
close to critical mass, and, despite official reports
to the contrary, the US-led occupying force won’t
likely be able to contain it.  It’s what always
happens in one form or other eventually under any kind
of foreign occupation and system of governance
unwilling to address the basic needs of the people -
extreme poverty and desperation demanding relief,
without which people can’t even survive.  It’s also a
response to the brutality of this occupation where war
crimes are just standard operating procedure and an
outrageous strategy used to contain the growing
resistance.  One example of it, most people in the
West wouldn’t understand, was the public burning of
supposed Taliban fighters killed by US soldiers.  This
is forbidden under Islamic law, and the images of it
provoked outrage in Afghanistan and throughout the
Muslim world that views the US occupiers as
barbarians.  This is just one of many instances of
deliberately inflicted offenses against Islam
including defiling the Koran, arbitrary and unlawful
indefinite detentions as well as humiliations, torture
and other atrocities committed routinely against
Afghans taken prisoner for any reason.  The same
things happen in most parts of Iraq as well.

Amnesty International documented some of the crimes
and abuses it learned from former detainees.  Just
like in Iraq they reported being made to kneel, stand
or maintain painful positions for long periods, being
hooded, deprived of sleep, stripped and humiliated.
They were also held without charge and denied access
to family, legal counsel or any kind of due process.
In December, 2004, US officials acknowledged eight
prisoners died in US military custody with little
detail as to why.  Earlier in October, the US Army’s
Criminal Investigation Division recommended that 28 US
soldiers be charged with beating to death two
prisoners at the Bagram air base after autopsies found
“blunt force injuries.”  At year end only one of the
soldiers was charged with any offense, and it was just
for assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty. 

One other report in September showed US Special Forces
beat and tortured eight Afghan soldiers for over two
weeks at a base near Gardez killing one of them.  The
US military refused calls for independent
investigations of torture and deaths of those held in
custody and instead went through the motions of
conducting them under the auspices of the US
Department of Defense (DOD) - meaning, of course, they
were whitewashed. US authorities also routinely refuse
requests by human rights groups, NGOs, and the
Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission
(AIHRC) for access to detainees to assess their
condition and treatment.  Amnesty also reported on
death sentences being meted out, secret trials in a
special court held without the right to counsel or any
form of due process, and many cases of Afghan refugees
returning home and being unable to recover land or
property stolen from them.

Amnesty also reported on the many civilian deaths
resulting from randomly targeted US air strikes
supposedly directed at “armed militants.”  These
attacks are frequent killing many hundreds of innocent
Afghans and always claimed by the US military only to
have been directed against Al Queda or Taliban
fighters.  The evidence shows otherwise.  On one
dramatic occasion early in the conflict in December,
2001, US airstrikes against the village of Niazi Kala
in eastern Afghanistan killed dozens of civilians
resulting in the London Guardian and Independent each
running front page stories with headlines: “US Accused
of Killing Over 100 Villagers in Airstrike” in the
Guardian and “US Accused of Killing 100 Civilians in
Afghan Bombing Raid” in the Independent.  Even the
Rupert Murdoch-owned London Times reported “100
Villagers Killed in US Airstrike.”  In contrast,
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reported the
New York Times (known as the nation’s newspaper of
record) could barely get itself to headline “Afghan
Leader Warily Backs US Bombing.”  Instead of
accurately reporting what happened, the NYT instead
merely mentioned these villagers had been killed as
background information in an article about whether the
nominal Afghan leader (and former CIA asset) Harmid
Karzai was holding firm in “his support for the war
against terrorism.”  As it usually does, the NYT plays
the lead role in directing the rest of the US
corporate media away from any disturbing truths
replacing them with a sanitized version acceptable to
US authorities.  They call it “All The News That’s Fit
To Print.” 

There was also no account at all in the US corporate
media, beyond the usual distorted version, of the
killing of about 800 captured Taliban prisoners in
November, 2001 at Mazar-i-Sharif by Northern Alliance
soldiers shooting down from the walls of the
fortress-like prison at the helpless Taliban fighters
trapped below.  It was never explained in the US
corporate-run media it was in response to a revolt
they staged because they were subjected to torture and
severe maltreatment.  US Special Forces and CIA
personal were on the ground assisting in the
slaughter by directing supportive air strikes by
helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers in an act of
butchery.  It recalled many like it earlier in Vietnam
at My Lai, the many thousands murdered by the infamous
Phoenix assassination program in that war, the CIA
organized and financed Salvadoran death squads in the
1980s and earlier that killed many thousands more, or
the later many thousands of Fallujah residents killed
along with mass destruction inflicted on this Iraqi
city in November, 2004 in a savage act of vengeance
and butchery following the killing of four Blackwater
USA paramilitary hired-gun enforcers earlier in the
year.  There was also no report on 3,000 other Taliban
and innocent civilian non-combatant prisoners who were
separated from 8,000 others who’d surrendered or had
been picked up randomly.  They were then transported
in what was later called a convoy of death to the town
of Shibarghan in closed containers lacking any
ventilation.  Half of them suffocated to death en
route and others were killed inside them when a US
commander ordered a Northern Alliance soldier to fire
into the containers supposedly to provide air but
clearly to kill or wound those inside who couldn’t
avoid the incoming fire.

The response from people suffering the effects of
these attacks and atrocities or knowing about them is
what would be expected anywhere but especially in a
country known for its history of determined resistance
by any means to free itself from an oppressive
occupier.  It happened in Afghanistan during the 19th
century “Great Game” period and then during the decade
of Soviet occupation in the 1980s.  It’s now happening
again and getting especially intense as described by
General David Richards, the British commander of NATO
forces in the country.  In early August he described
the fighting as some of the worst, most prolonged and
ferocious he knew of in 60 years with his forces
coming under repeated “hit-and-run” and other attacks
by Taliban guerrilla fighters engaging in machine gun
and grenade battles before dispersing and later
regrouping for more attacks.  He said: “This sort of
thing hasn’t really happened so consistently, I don’t
think, since the Korean War or the Second World War.
It happened for periods in the Falklands, obviously,
and it happened for short periods in the Gulf on both
occasions.  But this is persistent, low-level, dirty
fighting.”  One has to wonder if the general thinks
cluster-bombing and using other terror weapons from
30,000 feet to kill innocent civilians in villages is
fighting clean. 

The kind of intense fighting the general is talking
about was reported in the London Observer on September
17 on what relatives of British troops serving in
Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province have to say.
They’re raising grave concerns for their loved ones
safety claiming they face “intolerable” pressures and
dangers, relentless fighting, inadequate supplies of
rations and water, having to get by on three hours
sleep a night, having no body armour, and so shattered
and exhausted by the experience they can’t function
properly.  With this to expect, why would any sensible
foreign leader heed NATO’s request for more troops to
help a failed mission guaranteed to get numbers of
them killed and wounded and frighten and anger their
own people at home in the process.  So far only
Poland, likely under intense pressure, agreed to do it
in any meaningful numbers in a high-level decision it
may end up regretting.

The result of recent fighting on the British alone is
that 33 of their soldiers have been reported killed in
the last two months up to late-September - including
14 killed on September 2 in a warplane the Taliban
claim they downed over Banjwai and Kandahar province
and 22 known killed since September 1.  The reported
number of deaths and injuries are likely understated
as a good many of the wounded later die but aren’t
added to the official count.  It’s known and
documented this kind of sanitized casualty reporting
is the way it’s done in Iraq.  No doubt it’s handled
the same way in Afghanistan as well.

It’s happening because the Taliban resistance is
gaining strength fueled by the repressive occupation
and brutality of the Northern Alliance “warlords,”
making a growing number of Afghans determined to fight
back.  It’s also because of the extreme level of
desperation and deprivation Afghans now experience
resulting from the so-called neoliberal Washington
Consensus model the US has imposed on the country just
like it wants to do everywhere else it can get away
with it.  It’s a model solely beholden to the
interests of capital, ignores the essential needs of
the people desperate for relief and help, but in an
impoverished country like Afghanistan, that’s a recipe
for pushing people toward Islamic fundamentalist
leaders promising something better than their current
state of immiseration.  It makes it easy for them to
get recruits to join the struggle to end it.
Apparently growing numbers of them are doing just that
as they have been for the past three years in Iraq to
fight back relentlessly refusing to quit until the
occupation ends which it likely will eventually in
both countries.

The US Plan to Pacify Afghanistan and Control It As A
Neocolonial State

The Bush administration has no sense of history
judging by its plan to control Afghanistan by
neutralizing any resistance in it to make the country
one more de facto pacified US colony.  It failed to
heed the lessons learned in Vietnam where the US was
defeated or even in Korea before it where the war
there ended in a standoff.  It’s proceeding anyway in
spite of the information from the Pentagon’s latest
quarterly progress report on Iraq to the Congress.  In
it Pentagon officials paint a grim assessment of a
lost war where the same tactics now used in
Afghanistan have failed.  Those facts, however, don’t
deter US planners who won’t admit they’re wrong and
intend to keep repeating the same mistakes no matter
how many times before they haven’t worked.  It’s part
of the Bush administration’s Messianic mission of
madness under which the thinking must be if at first
you don’t succeed, try again by making things worse
with another misadventure.  It’s also part of the
misbegotten belief that superior air power, high tech
weapons, and a little help mostly from a proxy force
on the ground can solve all problems.  High-level
military strategists once again intend to try proving
it in Afghanistan even though they know it hasn’t
worked in Iraq.

The Afghanistan plan involves the use of overwhelming
US air power that can quickly send down a reign of
death and destruction against any area or resistance
it wishes to attack.  It’s to be done by concentrating
its hub activities at two large, permanent
US-constructed bases, Bagram and Kandahar, while it
wants NATO forces to operate a large new base under
construction in Herat that can accommodate about
10,000 troops.  In 2005, the US Air Force spent about
$83 million upgrading the two bases it will use in the
country.

The plan is also to have US forces maintain about 30
smaller, forward operating bases with 14 small
airfields housing highly mobile air and ground forces
secured in fortified areas and only used for special
search operations leaving routine patrol missions for
the local satraps to handle.  The plan calls for a
reduction in US ground forces with NATO troops
replacing them, especially in the more volatile
Kandahar, Helmand and Urzugan provinces.  In its
“first (ever) mission outside the Euro-Atlantic area”
NATO forces took command of the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in August, 2003
“to assist the Government of Afghanistan….in
maintaining security….and in providing a safe and
secure environment (for) free and fair elections, the
spread of the rule of law, and the reconstruction of
the country.”  This was pious rhetoric belying the
reality on the ground that all occupiers are there
only as enforcers to make Afghanistan safe for
corporate predators wanting to exploit the country and
its people for profit. 

The US is also recruiting, training and wants to
employ a local proxy Afghan National Army and Police
to perform the same role by doing much of the routine
patrolling and to engage in ground combat when
necessary.  This is a common US tactic to use a
surrogate force of expendable locals to do as much of
its fighting and dying for it to keep its own
casualties to a minimum.  It intends to support them
with its tactical air strength mostly out of harm’s
way and sell the whole package apparently to the
Afghan people and US public by using what the Bush
administration calls “strategic communication” - aka
well-crafted propaganda, disinformation and carefully
sanitized versions of the truth to suppress an honest
account of it from ever coming out so that the
perception they’re able to craft replaces the reality
they wish to conceal.

When it comes to deploying overwhelming conventional
military superiority including the most highly
developed and destructive high-tech weapons and a vast
array of almost limitless air power, no competing
force can challenge the US.  The Pentagon is now
deploying those air assets round the clock across the
country using its most sophisticated bombers and other
aircraft deployed from its bases in Diego Garcia.
They’re on call at all times for tactical support and
heavy strike missions as needed.  In addition,
unmanned Predator and Desert Hawk aerial drones are
also airborne over the country at all times,
especially in areas thought to be most hostile.  The
Predator is able to launch rocket attacks on targets
while the tiny Desert Hawk is a spy plane used for
surveillance around US bases.  Put it all together and
this is what an unwanted foreign occupier has to do to
keep a population in check after it “liberated” it.
The plain fact is it hasn’t worked in Iraq and likely
won’t fare any better in Afghanistan.

But there’s more to this story though as reported on
September 5 in the online publication Capitol Hill
Blue titled Has Bush gone over the edge?  It explains
that Republican and Bush family insiders including the
President’s father and former President are worried
George Bush may be heading for a “full-fledged mental
breakdown” judging by his bizarre behavior at times.
Jeffrey Steinberg writing in Executive Intelligence
Review said G.H.W. Bush fears G.W. is obsessed with
his Messianic mission and is “unreachable” even by
some of his closest advisors like Secretary of State
Rice.  Prominent psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, who
wrote Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the
President, agrees and believes: “With every passing
week, President Bush marches deeper and deeper into a
world of his own making.  Central to Bush’s world is
an iron will which demands that external reality be
changed to conform to his personal view of how things
are.”  He goes on to say Bush needs psychiatric
analysis and help.  These observations explain a lot -
that George Bush indeed has a Messianic mission and
intends to pursue it no matter how failed it is
because he believes it’s the right thing to do.  And
apparently he has enough close advisors around him
reinforcing this view making it very likely there will
be no Middle East or Central Asian policy change as
long as he’s President.  It helps explain why the
policy that’s failed in Iraq is still being followed,
why it’s the plan for Afghanistan as well even though
it isn’t likely to succeed there either, and why this
administration wants to go even further and is willing
to compound the disaster it already created.

George Bush announced his policy intentions in a
speech he made on September 5 to an association of US
military officers in which he virtually declared war
against the entire Muslim world.  In it he used the
kind of inflammatory language that should give the
senior Bush far greater cause to worry whether his son
has lost his senses entirely.  The speech was more of
the administration’s rhetoric to rebrand the “global
war on terror” to what it now calls the “long war with
Islamic fascists” and the threat of “Islamic fascism”
that must be confronted by its reasoning (and by
implication) where it’s centered in Tehran.  It was
also George Bush’s apparent attempt to rescue his
failing presidency by appealing to his most extremist
backers, shore up his base, and scare everyone else to
death enough to support his “long war” agenda on
November 7 by reelecting Republicans to Congress many
of whom see him as radioactive and keep their
distance. 

No doubt the Svengali hand of Karl Rove is behind
this.  It can’t be dismissed because it signals
another reckless step toward a widened “long war”
crusade against Islam.  It further angered the nearly
1.8 billion Muslims worldwide who were even more
enraged by Pope Benedict’s inflammatory September 12
quote of a 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor
who said (during the Crusades at that time) that the
Prophet Muhammad had brought the world only “evil and
inhuman” things.  Despite his disingenuous claim of
being misunderstood, Popes don’t make accidental
comments, especially in an age of instant worldwide
communication, so clearly this one made his with
another purpose in mind.  It may relate to why he
disturbingly chose to withdraw from the interfaith
initiatives begun by his predecessor, John Paul II.
He did it at a time when such efforts are more needed
than ever and tells Muslims he believes in the myth
that Islam is a violent faith, war and occupation of
Muslim lands is the way to counteract it, and he’s
part of the West’s new crusade against them. 

Put another way, Pope Benedict’s comment was a clear
papal genuflection and declaration of fealty to the
exploitive and racist war on the Muslim world policies
of the Bush administration.  He added resonance and,
in effect, gave his blessing to an out-of-control US
President’s belief in the same notion only made worse
by George Bush’s further public pronouncement that
dissent is an act of terrorism, saying it solely on
his own authority, and effectively abrogating the
First Amendment that prohibits the criminalization of
speech.  This kind of assertion reinforces George
Bush’s earlier in the year self-anointment as a
“Unitary Executive” giving himself absolute power to
suspend the Constitution and declare martial law to
protect the national security any time he alone
decides a “national emergency” warrants it.  Unless
the public refuses to accept this reckless
endangerment of our sacred constitutional rights and
enough prominent public figures join in as well to
denounce this kind of talk, there’s a real danger this
administration is moving toward “crossing the Rubicon”
to tyranny on the false pretext of protecting us from
an Islamic terrorist threat that doesn’t exist.

Looking Ahead In Afghanistan

US directed repression of the Afghan people aided by
its brutal Northern Alliance regional “warlord”
proxies has led to the beginning of a growing
insurrection against an intolerable situation that’s
unsustainable.  It has the upper hand in Iraq and is
fast becoming more of the same in Afghanistan.  It’s
what always happens because no unwanted occupier is
ever accepted by the people it subjugates, especially
one whose prime mission is to terrorize the civilian
population to pacify it.  The mission is doomed to
fail as eventually it becomes inefficient, ineffective
and people back home no longer will tolerate it.  By
now it would seem cooler heads in Washington and at
the Pentagon would have made some headway convincing
the hard line neocons behind this growing misadventure
and the out-of-control one in Iraq that it was time to
cut losses, pull out, and go another way.  Those among
them with enough good sense have to realize even the
most powerful military in the world has no chance to
defeat a determined guerilla force gaining strength
because it has most of the people in the country
behind it.  And there have to be at least a few
high-level mandarins with a sense of history to
understand they saw this script before, and it has a
bad ending.  It brought Rome to its knees a millennium
and a half ago and did the same thing more recently to
the Nazis with delusions of grandeur who thought their
way would prevail for 1,000 years.  They only missed
by 988. 

So it goes for the modern-day Romans in charge in
Washington led by a President who believes his cause
is just and the Almighty is directing him.  They also
feel with enough super-weapons they can rule the world
forever as long as they don’t miscalculate and blow it
up instead (a very real and disturbing possibility).
It didn’t work for the original rulers of ancient
Rome, and it’s also not working now for those in
charge in Israel apparently under the same illusions,
who also have no sense of history except their own
false version of it.  It won’t work for the US rulers
either who want their dominion to be all of planet
earth. 

It’s high time some clear-thinking high-level insiders
went public convincingly to drive home this point the
ones in charge with “delusions of grandeur” won’t
ever see without help and unless forced to.  The plain
fact is the war in Iraq is lost militarily and
politically.  The longer US forces stay there the
greater their losses will be, the larger the number of
alienated countries no longer willing to support us
will become, the more likely the enormous and
unsustainable cost will move the nation closer to
economic bankruptcy, and the harder it will be to
reverse the mind-set of the majority of countries that
already see us as a moral pariah and terror state.
Conditions are no less true in Afghanistan where the
resistance is close to critical mass and the situation
is fast becoming another lost cause because the
momentum carrying it there is almost irreversible. 

It’s never easy changing the hearts and minds of the
privileged elite riding high and mesmerized by their
own self-adulation and that heaped on them by the
corporate media, PR flacks, and assorted hangers-on
portraying their cause as just.  Charting a new course
with that kind of strong tailwind is like trying to
get a battleship to make a quick U-turn - darn-near
impossible.  It makes for the same likely conclusion
just as in the past.  Empires ruling the waves, and
having it their own way, almost never spot the time
when the tide begins to turn and they’re swimming
against it.  Sooner or later, they’re wrecked on the
shoals of their own hubris, a new force is rising to
replace them, and an old familiar refrain is heard
again - the king is dead, long live the king.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).  Also visit his blogspot
at sjlendman.blogspot.com.