As the West prepares to ‘Exit with Honour’ from Afghanistan, it is difficult to remember why we were there
Can anyone tell me what has been accomplished by over ten years of American and British boots on the ground in Afghanistan? The Taliban is poised to retake control where they don’t already run things and by all accounts the Afghanistan government and people are ready to let it happen. Women are still treated like dirt – with child brides being bought and sold as a normal practice. According to Medica Mondiale and UNICEF, 57 per cent of Afghan females are married under the age sixteen without their consent, with girls as young as eight and nine being taken as wives by 50 year old men.
And the west is not even talking about the resurgence of Bacha Bazi – the infamous tradition of dressing boys as girls for use as ‘entertainment’ by older men. Sexual abuse of children is a cultural norm that our leaders seem to tolerate – just like they tolerate other Afghan cultural norms such as child brides, the mutilation of women and the continuing abuse, rape and murder of non-Muslims living in Islamic societies.
Islam is enshrined as the state religion in the ‘new’ Afghan constitution. Bibles and other non-Muslim religious texts are forbidden in the country and people have been sentenced to death under the ‘new’ government for leaving Islam, or insulting Islam or the Muslim prophet Mohammed. Anyone who converts to Christianity is sentenced to death by the government courts.
What outcome were we looking for? What is the definition of ‘victory’ in this war? How will we know it is time to leave? Why not now? What will change in another six months or two years?
Last weekend as I dug through an old box of Dad’s things, I came across a thirty-five year old softcover book: A Rumour of War by Philip Caputo. A “Hatchards, Piccadilly, London” card was inside, I presume as a bookmark. I smiled and started reading. Three hours later when I looked up the sun was gone and I hadn’t moved.
From the first page, all I could think about was Afghanistan. I’ve typed out the first page and a bit for you – if you want more you’ll have to buy the book…
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars…
~ Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1
This book does not pretend to be history. It has nothing to do with politics, power, strategy, influence, national interests, or foreign policy; nor is it an indictment of the great men who led us into Indochina and wholes mistakes were paid for with the blood of some quite ordinary men. In a general sense, it is simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them. More strictly, it is a soldier’s account of our longest conflict, the only one we have ever lost, as well as the record of a long and sometimes painful personal experience.
On March 8, 1965, as a young infantry officer, I landed at Danang with a battalion of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the first U.S. combat unit sent to Indochina. I returned in April 1975 as a newspaper correspondent and covered the Communist offensive that ended with the fall of Saigon. Having been among the first Americans to fight in Vietnam, I was also among the last to be evacuated, only a few hours before the North Vietnamese Army entered the capital.
Although most of this book deals with the experiences of the marines I served with in 1965 and 1966, I have included an epilogue briefly describing the American exodus. Only ten years separated the two events, yet the humiliation of our exit from Vietnam, compared to the high confidence with which we had entered, made it seem as if a centre lay between them.
For Americans who did not come of age in the early sixties, it may be hard to grasp what those years were like – the pride and overpowering self-assurance that prevailed. Most of the thirty-five hundred men in our brigade, born during or immediately after World War II, were shaped by that era, the age of Kennedy’s Camelot. We went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of those years was as much to blame as our youth.
War is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had always been seduced into uniform by Kennedy’s challenge to “ask what you can do for your country” and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us. America seemed omnipotent then: the country could still claim it had never lost a war, and we believed we were ordained to play cop to the Communists’ robber and spread our own political faith around the world. Like the French soldiers of the late eighteenth century, we saw ourselves as the champions of “ a cause that was destined to triumph.” So, when we marched into the rice paddies on the damp March afternoon. We carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and the rifles; the convictions we lost.
The discovery that the men we had scorned as peasant guerillas were, in fact, a lethal, determined enemy and the casualty lists that lengthened each week with nothing to show for the blood being spilled broke our early confidence. By autumn, what had begun as an adventurous expedition had turned into an exhausting, indecisive war of attrition in which we fought for no cause other than our own survival…
Taken from the prologue of Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977)
Barbados Free Press 
Here ya go, BFP. Maybe this article by Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and a distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, might assist you in connecting a few dots.
Launching the U.S. Terror War: the CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia
Bush’s Terror War and the Fixing of Intelligence
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors.1 It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States.2 Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance — areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.
Terror War was formally declared by George W. Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001, with his statement to the American nation that “we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”3 But the notion that Bush’s terror war was in pursuit of actual terrorists lost credibility in 2003, when it was applied to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country known to have been targeted by terrorists but not to have harbored them.4 It lost still more credibility with the 2005 publication in Britain of the so-called Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British intelligence service MI6 reported after a visit to Washington in 2002 that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.“5 False stories followed in due course linking Iraq to WMD, anthrax, and Niger yellowcake (uranium).
This essay will demonstrate that before 9/11 a small element inside the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit and related agencies, the so-called Alec Station Group, were also busy, “fixing” intelligence by suppressing it, in a way which, accidentally or deliberately, enabled the Terror War. They did so by withholding evidence from the FBI before 9/11 about two of the eventual alleged hijackers on 9/11, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, thus ensuring that the FBI could not surveil the two men or their colleagues.
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The Terror War and the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz Project of Global Dominion
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But in the course of this essay I shall dwell on the activities of the head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Richard Blee, in Uzbekistan as well as Afghanistan. Uzbekistan was an area of concern not only to Blee and his superior Cofer Black; it was also in an area of major interest to Richard Cheney, whose corporation Halliburton had been active since 1997 or earlier in developing the petroleum reserves of Central Asia. Cheney himself said in a speech to oil industrialists in 1998, “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”14
I shall suggest that the purpose as well as the result of protecting the two Saudis may have been to fulfill the objectives of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) neocon group for establishing “forward-based forces” in Central Asia.15 We shall see that a phone call on 9/11 from CIA Director Tenet to Stephen Cambone, a key PNAC figure in the Pentagon, apparently transmitted some of the privileged information that never reached the FBI.
This neocon agenda was partially to maintain American and Israeli domination of the region for security purposes, and (as we shall see) to create the conditions for future unilateral preemptive actions against unfriendly states like Iraq. In particular it was designed to establish new secure bases in the Middle East, anticipating Donald Rumsfeld’s predictable announcement in 2003 that the U.S. would pull “virtually all of its troops, except some training personnel,” out of Saudi Arabia.16 But it was partly also to strengthen American influence in particular over the newly liberated states of Central Asia, with their sizable unproven oil and gas reserves.
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The Cover-Up of 9/11 and of the CIA’s Role in Letting It Happen
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This was just the beginning of a systematic, sometimes lying pattern, where NSA and CIA information about Al-Mihdhar and his traveling companion, Nawaf al-Hazmi, was systematically withheld from the FBI, lied about, or manipulated or distorted in such a way as to inhibit an FBI investigation of the two Saudis and their associates. This is a major component of the 9/11 story; because the behavior of these two would-be hijackers was so unprofessional that, without this CIA protection provided by the Alec Station Group, they would almost certainly have been detected and detained or deported, long before they prepared to board Flight 77 in Washington.41
Fenton concludes with a list of thirty-five different occasions where the two alleged hijackers were protected in this fashion, from January 2000 to about September 5, 2001, less than a week before the hijackings. In his analysis, the incidents fall into two main groups. The motive he attributes to the earlier ones, such as the blocking of Doug Miller’s cable, was “to cover a CIA operation that was already in progress.”43 However after “the system was blinking red” in the summer of 2001, and the CIA expected an imminent attack, Fenton can see no other plausible explanation than that “the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.”44
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29799
Old cowardly men use young expendable lives for their dreams of conquest or so called peace, without any serious thoughts to the consequences and price of war. Didn’t George Bush Jr get a waiver from his National Guard duty obligations?
What the US is left with now is a super new bureaucracy that has set the world back 30 years in human rights.
Has anyone noticed lately, in an age of supposed technological immediacy, how overpowering and overreaching the questions are becoming more and more offensive at US Customs.
Surely they can instantly tell by now ( retinal scans, past registries and conduct etc. ) who should be questioned ad nauseum.
This is not good for business when one can enter many countries in Europe with half the hassle and its bad for business.
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Here’s another interesting insight into the Afghanistan war from Prof. Peter Dale Scott. It is a chapter excerpt from his book American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA’s Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (needless to say, avaiable at Amazon).
Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War
by Prof Peter Dale Scott
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The Vietnam War as a Template for Afghanistan
The aim of the war machine has been consistent over the last three decades: to overcome the humiliation of a defeat in Vietnam by doing it again and getting it right. But the principal obstacle to victory in Afghanistan is the same as in Vietnam: the lack of a viable central government to defend. The relevance of the Vietnam analogy was rejected by Obama in his December 1 speech: “Unlike Vietnam,” he said, “we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” But the importance of the Vietnam analogy has been well brought out by Thomas H. Johnson, coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, and his co-author Chris Mason. In their memorable phrase, “the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template:”
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In Afghanistan in 2001 as in 1980, and as in Laos in 1959, the U.S. intervention has since been a bonanza for the international drug syndicates. With the increase of chaos in the countryside, and number of aircraft flying in and out of the country, opium production more than doubled, from 3276 metric tonnes in 2000 (and 185 in 2001, the year of a Taliban ban on opium) to 8,200 metric tonnes in 2007.
Why does the U.S. intervene repeatedly on the same side as the most powerful local drug traffickers? Some years ago I summarized the conventional wisdom on this matter:
Persuaded in part by the analysis of authors like Michel Chossudovsky and James Petras, I would now stress more heavily that American banks, as well as oil majors, benefit significantly from drug trafficking. A Senate staff report has estimated “that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks.”[46] The London Independent reported in 2004 that drug trafficking constitutes “the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.”[47]
Petras concludes that the U.S. economy has become a narco-capitalist one, dependent on the hot or dirty money, much of it from the drug traffic.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16713
What we need now is another Iron Curtain, this time imposed by the Western Powers -not by Russia/USSR.
This new Iron Curtain would effectively isolate all Middle Eastern/slammic countries, and their oil! so they can continue to live in hate and civil war and their preferred 7th. Century beliefs
while the rest of us continue on in Science and Knowledge, here in our 21st. Century
Well, in spite of what seems to be slow or not progress in Afghanistan. The Taliban nonetheless seems to be on the run wouldn’t you say? I must say though, I see progress in Afghanistan quite differently than some. One would think that if one woman is saved from the puritanical misogamist men in Afghanistan, whose idea it is to relegate women to mere instruments of abuse. Then there has been some progress made in this war in some respects, in my estimation.
At least the backward Afghans and Taliban now know what the outside world expects of them, and how the outside world operates: quite differently to their idea of “Life”!! and the women have been given a glimpse of possibilities and freedom from SLAVERY…which is what that system would seem to represent
Women Wore Mini-Skirts in Afghanistan? Why Congress Must Say No to More War.
Afghans are some of the most bombed-out, shot-up, messed-with people in the world. It started when Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to give the Soviets “their own Vietnam.” The Afghans were in the midst of growing pains into a modern, moderate Islam, nominally socialist society, when Brzezinski heard the word “SOCIALIST?!”
According to recently declassified records and admissions by Brzezinski and Robert Gates, it was a full six months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that the CIA began to arm the conservative Islamic resistance against the nominally Marxist regime. The regime consisted of young Afghans tired of seeing their people starving over the hundreds of years, and filled their heads with idealistic thoughts about everybody eating, without being affiliated with the Soviet Union. But that didn’t matter to Ziggy. The word Marxist was enough. They had to be taken out
Those commies believed in the education of women, and for a time Kabul opened up to the world and women even began to wear miniskirts, unharassed. Author and journalist Paul Fitzgerald, one of the first journalists to be granted access to the country after the Marxist coup of the Afghan monarch, says:
“Afghanistan had made significant strides in its efforts to modernize and construct a civilian democracy long before Pakistan was even invented. Afghanistan’s progressive monarch gave women the right to vote in the 1920’s while the rights guaranteed under its Constitution were debated openly and freely prior to the Soviet invasion.”
What happened after the covert CIA attack of the Marxist Kabul government is history. We created the mujahadeen, some of whom split off to become the Taliban. Big mistake.
Afghanistan to this day is the most heavily landmined country in the world. On average 60 Afghans a month are still killed by landmines, most of them children who don’t know what to look for as they play. It has the highest percentage of disabled people in the world, mostly from landmines. There have been over 70,000 Afghan landmine victims since 1990.
Where did all these landmines come from? Most of them the Russians planted, after the CIA drew them in by destabilizing the nominally-Marxist government (not atheist, their flag had the Crescent upon it) to “give them their own Vietnam.”
As soon as the mujahadeen drove the Soviets across the border, with the help of billions of dollars in CIA arms and a few Stinger missiles, we turned our back Afghanistan like a bad boyfriend. Over the next ten years over 2 million Afghans perished through starvation, cold winters, and fighting among the factions and warlords we had armed, who were using the weapons they had left over.
http://warisacrime.org/node/53590
Hillary Clinton Admits the U.S. Government Created al-Qaeda
Actually Hillary makes one major false statement in the video above. She claims that the US only got involved in arming and supporting the fundamentalist mujhadeen fighters AFTER the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. This is an outright falsehood. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, has gone on record stating that the US actually started assisting the fundamentalist Muslim resistance movement (that later became Al Qaeda) before the Soviet invasion. Their intention was that by starting a Muslim fundamentalist revolt against the then secular, Marxist Afghan government, it would cause the Soviet Union to send troops into Afghanistan to support the government. The intention in Brzezinski’s own words was to give the Soviet Union “their own Vietnam.”
BFP I have a post in moderation just prior to this Youtube video. Could you release it please. It has a link to an article with more details on this secular, socialist Afghanistan government which was making some notable progress in advancing the liberation of women in Afghanistan before it was overthrown by the US backed warlords and fundamentalist forces bringing the progressive moves that had been made to liberate, educate and empower women to a speedy halt. Brzezinski in an interview with a French newspaper explained that he thought it was all well worth it to give the USSR their Vietnam experience.
Please help the child victims of bacha baazi by signing the below petition. Takes only 1 minute to sign.
https://www.change.org/petitions/children-in-crisis-build-a-shelter-in-which-bacha-baazi-victims-can-both-live-and-learn