Four US Soldiers Killed in Afghanistan
by Ian Mosley
Once more it’s time for us to stroll down memory lane and take a peek at America’s “Forgotten War”–the low-level guerrilla insurgency which has been flickering in Afghanistan for the past five years, ever since the 2001 U. S. invasion. Remember that “famous victory?” That “splendid little war” as they used to say in Victorian times? Remember George Dubya swaggering and preening and boasting about how he had done what no one from Alexander the Great had been able to do, that he had conquered Afghanistan? Remember the cheering neocons cackling about their “victory” while Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack thought he was really doing something to avenge 911? Remember the happy talk from the beautifully coiffed and tailored talking heads on Fox News?
Well, what goes around, comes around. Five years later the Northern Alliance gangs who won the war for us have disintegrated and the Karzai regime is the usual sink of Asiatic corruption, as his officials cruise around Kabul in their armored limousines with their whores and Halliburton contracts in their pocket. Meanwhile, the rest of Afghanistan is mired in violence, misery, poverty and chaos.
Not one 911 hijacker came from Afghanistan. We have been told countless times that Osama was “definitely” in that nation, but why couldn’t we catch him there? Shortly before the war, the Taliban government awarded a $15 billion dollar natural gas pipeline to the Bridas oil company of Argentina. Not too surprisingly, the biggest project in Afghanistan has been quietly reassigned to the American oil company Unocal.
Thanks to Bush’s war in Iraq, our military presence has shrunk in Afghanistan and the Taliban has been filling the power vacuum. Every Empire that invaded Afghanistan has wound up regretting it and the US will be no exception. As more time passes, the Afghans are growing increasingly hostile –and as usual George Bush has no exit strategy. A recent news article reports “Four U.S. soldiers have been killed and another wounded during a battle with militants inside Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, the U.S. military said. The battle — part of the ongoing “Operation Mountain Lion” — happened in the northern part of Nuristan Province Wednesday along the mountainous border area where suspected Taliban and al Qaeda remnants are suspected of taking refuge. Coalition forces attacked enemy positions in a remote area of the Kamdesh District, when the soldiers were killed. The operation continued into Wednesday night, in the air and on the ground, the military said. Enemy casualties have yet to be determined, the military said.”
It’s understandable why the Afghan war has been overshadowed in the media and in the public mind by the much larger, more spectacular debacle in Iraq, with almost 150,000 troops and another 22,000 reservists now called up and on the way. But dead is dead, whether an American soldier gets it in the wild Hindu Kush mountains or the back streets of Fallujah.