A reminder of how we ended up in Afghanistan. Yet, some smart people, like
Andrew Bassovitch, whom I heard on a Dig podcast today, believed that the US
was correct in punishing the Taliban for "harboring a terrorist". I guess he
never heard that the Taliban offered to hand Bin Ladin over to the
International Criminal Court at the Hague and the Bush administration
refused the offer. Or maybe he heard and thought that the US should punish
the Taliban and the ICC was irrelevant. He is, as he explained on the
podcast, a political conservative.
Miriam
Afghanistan War Year 38: Trump Wants More
Thursday, August 24, 2017
By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed
a paratrooper walks past an Afghan graveyard during a US - Afghan patrol
April 30, 2012, Ghazni province, Afghanistan. (Photo: Sgt. Michael J.
MacLeod / The US Army)
When I dropped my daughter off at pre-school on Monday morning, I made a
point of asking the teacher about eye safety issues regarding the looming
solar eclipse. We're not even going to bother with it, she said. There's too
many kids to keep track of, they're not old enough to be trusted on
something like this, and we weren't going to go out and get a bunch of stuff
we'd only use once. The eclipse is happening at naptime, she said, so we're
just going to skip it.
Fan-dab-tastic, I said, one less thing to worry about . and then I turned on
the television, and there was the president of the United States staring
belligerently into the sky, straight at the sun with no protective glasses
or anything while his aides shrieked helplessly at him to stop. The next
morning, the far-right proto-fascist host of my local sports radio show
proudly boasted that he, too, looked straight into the sun without
protective eyewear because, like his president, he was not afraid of
anything.
These are the kind of people who are making decisions on the ongoing and
expanding war in Afghanistan. Mr. Trump wants about 4,000 more troops
deployed for a mission he refuses to define and which has no goal or
end-point established. Truthout reporter Mike Ludwig has broken down the
numbers after 16 years of war, and it does for all the world appear that a
lot of decisions have been made by people who have stared into the naked sun
for far too long.
There were times during the 2016 presidential campaign when I had to
physically restrain myself from biting my television until it died. More
often than not, these moments came when Trump was on some stump bloviating
about his standard nonsense. Every so often, however, he'd say something I
agreed with -- I have a busted watch in a drawer here that's right twice a
day, but you take it where you can find it -- and his position on
Afghanistan was usually the least wrong thing he'd say on any given day.
Take his tweet from January of 2013: "Let's get out of Afghanistan. Our
troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions
there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA." Same old ham-fisted Donald, writing like
someone who couldn't find Afghanistan on a map, but like my busted watch, he
was right twice during that campaign, and his people believed him most
sincerely when he spoke of ending the war (he also got the Trans-Pacific
Partnership right, thank goodness for small favors . though he's now going
back on that as well).
Flash forward to a few hours after he stared into the sun, and another
campaign promise went sailing out the window. Trump did his level best to
spin it, never deviating for a second from his prepared teleprompter
remarks, but it still landed like a wet slap in the faces of those who love
him best.
So, yeah, here we go again. The news media will go on about how this is the
longest war in US history while simultaneously missing the point and telling
only half the story. The United States became directly involved with
Afghanistan some 38 years ago, on July 3, 1979. On that day, at the behest
of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter
signed the first directive in an operation meant to destabilize the
Soviet-controlled government of Afghanistan. The idea was not to topple that
government, but to goad the Soviets into an invasion to protect that
government. Brzezinski believed, correctly, that such an occurrence would
give the USSR "its Vietnam War."
Brzezinski boasted of this years later, in a 1998 interview given to Le
Nouvel Observateur:
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they
intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in
Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of
truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had
the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to
regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote
to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its
Vietnam war.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme],
having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban
or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the
liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Again, this was 1998, our age of innocence. The Soviets invaded in December
of 1979, and over the next 10 years the Reagan administration armed and
supported the Mujahadeen "freedom fighters" who later became the Taliban and
al-Qaeda. One of the recipients of our largesse in Afghanistan during this
time was a wealthy Saudi Arabian ex-pat named Osama bin Laden.
The Soviets finally retreated in 1989 and crawled home to die. With our
geopolitical goals met, the US also withdrew, and Afghanistan collapsed into
a blistering civil war, fought with discarded US and Soviet weaponry, that
lasted until a Taliban victory in 1996. The country emerged from that chaos
having learned a neat trick: Thanks to the United States, the veterans of
these long wars now know how to bring a superpower to its knees. All it
takes is time, and patience, and the weapons their enemy left on the
battlefield. Not long ago, the US started bombing its own ordnance in Iraq.
That's been happening in Afghanistan for decades.
The aftermath is the Twin Towers and plastic sheeting and duct tape and
watch what you say and torture and mass surveillance thanks to the NSA and
the USA PATRIOT Act and all the stinking rest of it. The decisions made
regarding Afghanistan, going back 38 years to the Carter administration,
have been almost too catastrophic to quantify. We have done incomprehensible
damage to ourselves. We have turned Afghanistan and Iraq into unimaginably
expensive killing floors over a combined total of 65 years, yet somehow
4,000 more troops sent on yet another ill-defined mission will see the job
done, whatever the job is.
There is an awful, eerie whispering between the lines of the Afghanistan war
dispatches from 16 years ago. "Many western nations believe that the
Northern Alliance cannot provide a stable government for Afghanistan because
its leaders are from a minority ethnic group, the Tajiks," the BBC reported
in 2001. "The attempt to forge a power sharing deal by the United Nations
continues, seemingly oblivious to the reality on the ground."
Oblivious? Hardly. There are mineral rights to be hoarded, natural gas to be
plumbed, pipelines to be built. And of course, there is war, the most
profitable enterprise of all. The trillions we have wasted on this futile,
blood-soaked exercise did not simply disappear. A few people you'll never
meet got paid, and will get paid again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Not everyone spends their time staring into the sun. Some are too busy
counting their cash.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
William Rivers Pitt
William Rivers Pitt is a senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout. He is
also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books:
War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition
Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's
Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is
Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with Dahr Jamail, is available
now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.
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