After 18 years of war in Afghanistan–
America’s longest – US and Taliban negotiators are said to be close to an
agreement that may see the withdrawal of many of the 14,000 US soldiers in that
remote nation.
That’s
the official version. President Donald Trump keeps changing his mind
about the number of US troops to be withdrawn. The latest version from
the White House has 5,000 US troops remaining in Afghanistan as a permanent
garrison to guard the major air bases at Bagram and Kandahar and protect the
US-installed puppet Afghan government in Kabul.
Without US troops to defend
it, the Afghan regime of Ashraf Ghani would be swept away in days. Even
Trump has admitted this. Keeping the Ghani regime safe in Kabul would at
least provide a fig leaf to claim the US-backed government was still in charge.
The pro-war right in Washington is crying
to high heaven at this prospect. Senators and congressmen who never heard
a shot fired in anger are ready to fight to the last 18-year-old American
soldier and keep the trillion-dollar war sputtering on.
To date, 2,426
American soldiers have been killed in combat in Afghanistan, with some 20,000
wounded, many of them permanently maimed.
Thousands
of US-paid mercenaries and foreign troops dragooned into this conflict have
been killed or wounded. Heavy Afghan civilian casualties, mostly caused
by air strikes, are covered up by US occupation authorities. Without
24/7 US air support, American forces would have long ago been driven from
Afghanistan, as were their British and Soviet predecessors.
Proponents
of the Afghan War insist that ‘terrorists’ will take over if US troops
withdraw. By now, it’s unclear who the so-called ‘terrorists’ really
are. Previously, the US branded Taliban as terrorists. But now that the
US is negotiating with Taliban to end the war, Washington claims the threats
are the Islamic State from Iraq and something called ‘the Khorasan Group,’ a
figment of Washington’s imagination.
The US warns that if Taliban wins, it will
turn Afghanistan into a base for international terrorism. This is absurd.
Taliban today controls more than half the nation by day, and 80% by
night. There is plenty of room left for anti-US groups.
Contrary to US claims, Taliban was never a terrorist group.
I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan when Taliban was created. Civil
war in
Afghanistan after the Soviets
pulled out led to wide scale banditry, rapine and anarchy. A preacher
named Mullah Omar, a veteran of the anti-Soviet war, cobbled together a force
of ethnic Pashtun (Pathan) fighters and students to attack the bandits,
rapists, and opium-producing Communist forces causing mayhem. This
rag-tag movement came to be known as ‘talibs,’ or religious students.
Thus was born Taliban.
Mullah
Omar and his Pashtun fighters went on to drive the Communists from Kabul and
take most of the country. According to the UN, Taliban eliminated 90% of
Afghanistan’s opium production and brought a rough justice to the nation.
Washington demanded Taliban
turn over bin Laden. But the Afghan mountain warriors held to their tradition
of defending guests and refused, claiming bin Laden would never have
gotten a fair trial in the US. But they offered to send him for trial in
another Muslim nation like Turkey or Egypt. The US spurned this offer and
invaded Afghanistan, oblivious to its title ‘Graveyard of Empires.’
And
so, under the banner of the faux War on Terrorism, the US bombed and rocketed
Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest but proudest nations, for 18 years,
using B-1 heavy bombers and fleets of killer drones against mountain tribesmen
armed with old rifles and fierce courage.
America faces historic defeat in
Afghanistan. By not winning, it loses. How this loss
would affect the rest of America’s empire remains to be seen. But the
sooner America ends this shameful colonial war the better.
Eric S.
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 © 2019 Eric Margolis
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/eric-margolis/beware-the-vengeance-of-the-afghans/