After
17 bloody years, the longest war in US history continues without relent or
purpose in Afghanistan.
There,
a valiant, fiercely-independent people, the Pashtun (Pathan) mountain tribes,
have battled the full might of the US Empire to a stalemate that has so far
cost American taxpayers $4 trillion, and 2,371 dead and 20,320 wounded
soldiers. No one knows how many Afghans have died. The number is kept
secret.
Pashtun
tribesmen in the Taliban alliance and their allies are fighting to oust all
foreign troops from Afghanistan and evict the western-imposed and backed puppet
regime in Kabul that pretends to be the nation’s legitimate government.
Withdraw foreign troops and the Kabul regime would last for only days.
The
whole thing smells of the Vietnam War. Lessons so painfully learned by
America in that conflict have been completely forgotten and the same mistakes
repeated. The lies and happy talk from politicians, generals and media
continue apace.
This week, Taliban forces
occupied the important strategic city of Ghazni on the road from Peshawar to
Kabul. It took three days and massive air attacks by US B-1 heavy
bombers, Apache helicopter gun ships, A-10 ground attack aircraft, and massed
warplanes from US bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar and the 5th US Fleet to
finally drive back the Taliban assault. Taliban also overran key military
targets in Kabul and the countryside, killing hundreds of government troops in
a sort of Afghan Tet offensive.
Afghan
regime police and army units put up feeble resistance or ran away.
Parts of Ghazni were left in ruins. It was a huge embarrassment to the US
imperial generals and their Afghan satraps who had claimed ‘the corner in
Afghanistan has finally been turned.’
Efforts
by the Trump administration to bomb Taliban into submission have clearly
failed. US commanders fear using American ground troops in battle
lest they suffer serious casualties. Meanwhile, the US is running low on
bombs.
Roads
are now so dangerous for the occupiers that most movement must be by air.
Taliban is estimated to permanently control almost 50% of Afghanistan.
That number would rise to 100% were it not for omnipresent US air power. Taliban
rules the night.
Taliban
are not and never were ‘terrorists’ as Washington’s war propaganda falsely
claimed. I was there at the creation of the movement – a group of Afghan
religious students armed by Pakistan whose goal was to stop post-civil war
banditry, the mass rape of women, and to fight the Afghan Communists.
When
Taliban gained power, it eliminated 95% of the rampant Afghanistan opium-heroin
trade. After the US invaded, allied to the old Afghan Communists and northern
Tajik tribes, opium-heroin production soared to record levels. Today,
US-occupied Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium, morphine and
heroin.
US occupation authorities
claim drug production is run by Taliban. This is another big lie.
The Afghan warlords who support the regime of President Ashraf Ghani entirely
control the production and export of drugs. The army and secret police
get a big cut. How else would trucks packed with drugs get across the
border into Pakistan and Central Asia?
The
United States has inadvertently become one of the world’s leading drug
dealers. This is one of the most shameful legacies of the Afghan
War. But just one. Watching the world’s greatest power bomb and
ravage little Afghanistan, a nation so poor that some of its people can’t
afford sandals, is a huge dishonor for Americans.
Even
so, the Pashtun defeated the invading armies of Alexander the Great, Genghis
Khan, Tamerlane, the Mogul Emperors and the mighty British Raj. The US
looks to be next in the Graveyard of Empires.
Nobody
in Washington can enunciate a good reason for continuing the colonial war in
Afghanistan. One hears talk of minerals, women’s rights and democracy as
a pretext for keeping US forces in Afghanistan. All nonsense. A possible
real reason is to deny influence over Afghanistan, though the Chinese are too
smart to grab this poisoned cup. They have more than enough with their rebellious
Uighur Muslims.
Interestingly, the so-called
‘terrorist training camps’ supposedly found in Afghanistan in 2001 were
actually guerilla training camps run by Pakistani intelligence to train
Kashmiri rebels and CIA-run camps for exiled Uighur fighters from China.
The
canard that the US had to invade Afghanistan to get at Osama bin Laden, alleged
author of the 9/11 attacks, is untrue. The attacks were made by Saudis
and mounted from Hamburg and Madrid, not Afghanistan. I’m not even sure
bin Laden was behind the attacks.
My
late friend and journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave shared my doubts and insisted
that the Taliban leader Mullah Omar offered to turn bin Laden over to a court
in a Muslim nation to prove his guilt or innocence.
President
George Bush, caught sleeping on guard duty and humiliated, had to find an easy
target for revenge – and that was Afghanistan.
Eric
Margolis [send him
mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2018 Eric Margolis
