The Forgotten War: Afghanistan
by Ian Mosley
The war on Aghanistan is seen as the legitimate part of Bush’s war on terror. This of course assumes that al Qaeda is a real organization and not the creation of the CIA and/or Mossad. There are three curious facts about the Afghan War that most Americans don’t know. The first is that the Taliban government offered to turn over al Qaeda members to the US if the Bush administration merely offered proof of their guilt. The second is that a natural gas pipeline valued at 15 billion dollars across Afghanistan was “re-assigned” after the invasion from the Bridas oil company of Argentina to the American oil company Unocal. And third, the opium fields which the Taliban ruthlessly wiped out, are now back and in full production under the American occupation (raising suspicion that elements of the CIA continue to profit from the illegal drug trade).
Remember the big, swaggering “famous victory” over Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 as America’s military easily overran this remote mountainous country? One reason for the initial invasion of Afghanistan going so smoothly is that the Americans successfully exploited Afghan tribal divisions and hired the local thugs in the form of the so-called “Northern Alliance” to be forward observers for our air strikes. The spotlight has been on Iraq for three years now, and well it should be, but people seem to forget that the war in Afghanistan never quite went away. (more…)