When I read this article, I thought back to 2001. There was no Blind Democracy
list back then, or not one that I knew about. I think I was still mostly using
a dos computer. But I read an article sent from somewhere or other, written by
an Afghani American or perhaps a Brit, and he was begging the US government not
to make war on Afghanistan. He described the poverty of the people and what
they'd already been through. He pointed out that Afghanistan had nothing to do
with the 9/11 attacks. I already knew, before reading the article, that I was
opposed to the US taking revenge on Afghanistan for what had happened. I knew,
perhaps 2 or 3 people who agreed with me. But everyone else, and I mean
everyone, absolutely supported what the US was about to do. And then in 2003,
there were all those brave people expressing opposition to attacking Iraq, but
saying that of course, attacking Iraq was a very different matter from
attacking Afghanistan which, they believed, was perfectly justified. By the
time 2014 came along, even Sylvie was supporting US intervention in Syria, as
was, I believe, Amy Goodman. The voices of sanity like Seymour Hersh and the
British reporter from The Independent, whose name escapes me, and a few others,
are sidelined. Whatever rationality existed within our State Department and the
Pentagon, as well as mainstream journalists, is long gone, gone way before
Donald Trump ever appeared on the scene in an important role.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2019 1:19 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Afghanistan in 2019: Fewer US Troops, More CIA
Torture and Killings
Where do we turn when the Liars tell us so many lies that they begin believing
their own lies?
Carl Jarvis
On 1/4/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Afghanistan in 2019: Fewer US Troops, More CIA Torture and Killings By
William Boardman, Reader Supported News
03 January 19
No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American
empire as much as Afghanistan. There is virtually no possibility of a
military victory over the Taliban and little chance of leaving behind
a self-sustaining democracy - facts that Washington's policy community
has mostly been unable to accept.. It is a vestigial limb of empire,
and it is time to let it go.
- Op-Ed by Robert D. Kaplan, The New York Times, January 1, 2019
This is the voice of American imperialism speaking through one of its
more reliable hand-puppets. Foreign Policy has twice named Robert
Kaplan one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers." In his op-ed, Kaplan
blames Afghanistan's current problems on the illegal US war on Iraq in
2003, adding parenthetically and without further explanation: "which I
mistakenly supported." The unintended joke here is that he frames the
Iraq War as a mistake largely because it diverted the US from
nation-building in Afghanistan. Yes, he says exactly that. He has
nothing to say about either war's criminality or US atrocities. Those
are not serious concerns for the imperial mindset - those are just the
necessary inconveniences of maintaining an empire. He even appears
unaware that his formulation about Afghanistan and the decline of the
American empire perfectly fits the historical reality of US defeat in Vietnam.
On New Year's Eve, the day before Kaplan's op-ed, the lengthy lead
story in the Times was headlined: "CIA-Led Afghan Forces Leave Grim Trail of
Abuse."
This report is based on months of reporting on night raids, torture,
and summary executions of Afghan civilians carried out by CIA-trained
death squads, euphemistically called "strike forces" in the paper. The
instances described in the report are horrifying and savage. In one,
the death squad puts bags over the heads of two brothers, executing
them with their families in the next room. For good measure, the death
squad blew up the room where the bodies lay.
Perhaps it's just another sign of American psychic numbing, but the
Times story seems to have provoked little response from other media,
from politicians of any stripe, or from the public. More American war
crimes in some Muslim country? Well, Happy New Year!
The US invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, under Operation
Enduring Freedom, accusing the Taliban of harboring some of the 9/11
attackers, most of whom were Saudis. More to the point, the US has
been creating havoc in Afghanistan at least since 1979, when we
started training the mujahedeen to fight the Russians only to receive
"our" Islamist radicals' blowback at the Twin Towers. Afghanistan is a
country about the size of Texas with a population of about 35 million
(almost 40% literate). Some 63% of the population is under 25 years
old and so has little conscious memory of a time when Afghans weren't the
targets of the American war machine.
Presently the US has about 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, but nobody
now quite knows how long they'll be there. Mostly what US troops do is
protect the official government from the apparent majority of the
population that prefers the Taliban or some imaginary other option.
The Afghan government controls little more than half the country most
of the time. All sides have been killing civilians at the rate of
about 8,000 a year for several years now, with the US and allies doing
most of the killing. At least 18 CIA operatives were killed in
Afghanistan from 2001 to 2017. This disproportionately deadly toll has
not done much to win the hearts and minds of the people, but in
seventeen years, the US hasn't figured out how to do anything else
better than create carnage.
The CIA-run death squad campaign isn't new, but it has been seriously
expanded during the past two years. Death squad personnel run into the
thousands, mostly Afghans, but are recruited, trained, equipped, and
controlled by CIA agents or CIA contractors. They operate
independently of the US military command, typically without the
military's knowledge. They are effectively terrorist cells. They carry
out night raids, long opposed by the Afghan government and the
population at large. The night raids target civilians the CIA thinks
it has reason to assassinate or capture and torture. The Times report
describes survivors of night raids, all of whom insist on their
innocence. There is no official accountability for these terrorist
tactics:
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A. would not comment, nor would Afghans
directly involved with the forces. Afghan security officials in Kabul
tried to play down the level of the forces' autonomy and the nature of
their abuses. When pressed with details of specific cases, they did not
respond.
And there is no evidence that these terrorist tactics are doing any
good in a country that has despised foreign invaders for centuries.
Virtually the same US terror tactics failed spectacularly in Vietnam.
There the CIA mounted the infamous Phoenix Program to terrorize South
Vietnamese villages with CIA-run death squads who "neutralized more
than 80,000 real or suspected Viet Cong.
Once Osama bin Laden escaped capture in 2001, the US war in
Afghanistan lacked any clear mission. The Bush administration and the
military shifted their attention to making war on Iraq instead.
Failing to disengage sensibly from Afghanistan, the US let the war
drift on mindlessly. In 2009, President Obama declared Afghanistan the
"smart war" and decided to escalate it without really figuring out
why. Obama relied particularly on CIA drones to kill massive numbers
of people, mostly civilians, ultimately to no useful purpose.
In 2016, President Trump campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan.
Once in office, trump appointed Mike Pompeo to run the CIA. Pompeo set
out to expand CIA killing, particularly with the death squads
discreetly called "strike forces" by the Times. This paramilitary
escalation, primarily against the Taliban, was first reported in
October 2017, creating little stir. Six months later, the CIA still
denied the story was true. In the fall of 2017, Pompeo expressed US
policy this way:
We can't perform our mission if we're not aggressive. This is
unforgiving, relentless. You pick the word. Every minute, we have to
be focused on crushing our enemies.
At the same time, the Institute for Public Policy had a different
perspective, offered by former State Department career officer Matthew
Hoh, who served in Afghanistan. Hoh had resigned in 2009 in protest
against the Obama administration escalation of the war there. Calling
the 2017 CIA's expanded death squads part of "the broader war campaign
of the United States in the Muslim world," Hoh accurately predicted:
This CIA program of using Afghan militias to conduct commando raids,
the vast majority of which will be used against civilians despite what
the CIA states, falls in line with American plans to escalate the use
of air and artillery strikes against the Afghan people in Taliban-held
areas, almost all of whom are Pashtuns. Again, the purpose of this
campaign is not to achieve a political settlement or reconciliation,
but to brutally subjugate and punish the people, mostly rural
Pashtuns, who support the Taliban and will not give in to the corrupt
American run government in Kabul.
Since 2001, the US has watched passively as three presidents waged war
on Afghanistan, each committing war crimes and crimes against humanity
that would surely, in a just society, constitute impeachable offenses.
For all the public splutter of self-designated serious people over the
possible withdrawal of 2,000 US troops from Syria, the absence of real
reaction to how badly it's all going in Afghanistan is sort of amazing
(or would be for anyone still capable of amazement).
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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio,
TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the
Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of
America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine,
and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences.
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