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.
The Taliban guerrillas merely melted away into the mountains with their Kalashnikovs and now control an estimated forty per cent of Afghanistan. A recent AP news story reports that “Insurgents killed four U.S. soldiers and wounded three others in separate clashes in Afghanistan Saturday…Three U.S. soldiers were killed and three others wounded during combat operations in Pech district of the eastern Kunar province…American troops in that area are hunting for Taliban fighters and extremists close to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network in remote mountains hugging the Pakistani border.” In other words, they’re doing the same thing they were doing five years ago, using unreliable and unenthusiastic local mercenaries to conduct a desultory hunt for a man who is almost certainly long gone out of the area, and whenever the actual U. S. military pokes their noses out of their heavily fortified bases they get shot to pieces by the Afghan mountain people whose land they have invaded.
The article goes on to say that “A separate attack in southern Uruzgan province killed one U.S. soldier and one Afghan soldier Saturday.” The latest Afghan rebel effort is to attack the “schools” which spread Western propaganda and seek to destroy the unique Islamic and Muslim identity of the Afghans, and turn their children into burger and fry-chomping typical American fat kids who will grow up to vote for Anmerican puppet dictator Hamed Karzai and gawp at some Afghan equivalent of Fox News. “Militants have targeted schools, burning 144 to the ground over the past year and forcing another 200 to close following threats against teachers and students.” It seems there are still people in the world who will resist the corruption of their children with such so-called “Western Values” as Family Guy, McDonalds, and sodomy. Amazing!
Gunmen employed by Karzai’s puppet government aren’t having things all their own way, either. According to the AP “A mine in the country’s restive south killed a local police commander and an ambush by suspected insurgents left a spiritual leader [read a friend of Karzai] wounded.” The Karzai puppet regime controls only a small part of the capital, Kabul, (much like the Communist puppet government during the last 1980s) and the southern city of Kandahar, and is propped up by American bayonets. There is no question that if the Americans ever pulled out, Karzai would end up hanging from a lamp post like his predecessor the Soviet puppet president did.
The official coalition casualty toll in Afghanistan now stands at 430 dead, of whom 323 are American. Every empire that tried to occupy Afghanistan has found only death and disaster there. Too bad the Bush administration doesn’t exactly specialize in learning from history’s mistakes.