Wrong Enemy, Wrong War: Afghanistan Invasion Was Not About Terrorism
My Yahoo! News account sent me an email with the provocative byline: “After 9/11, US pursued the wrong enemy.” The first line of the article asks, “What if the United States has been waging the wrong war against the wrong enemy for the last 13 years in Afghanistan?”
Let’s not even mention Iraq. One million people dead. Four million refugees. Crippled power plants and water treatment centers that create unsanitary conditions for years to come. Debilitated infrastructure. Depleted Uranium fallout in the soil and the water. Contracted mercenaries shooting up marketplaces. Cruise missiles dropping from the sky to blow up neighborhoods. From George H W Bush, to Clinton, to W, the Iraqis should be used to it by now.
It’s too late for an ‘oops’ moment. It’s been over a decade of terrorizing families and farmers in Afghanistan. Killing their sons and their husbands, their children, and sometimes entire families. Sending unmanned aerial vehicles streaking overhead spitting fire at the villages and marketplaces that a computer program in Washington DC deemed a threat.
But what the Yahoo! article is really about is a new book called “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2014” by a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist named Carlotta Gall. What an edgy name for a journalist. But not quite edgy enough, it seems, to propel Gall to expand her analysis.
It’s not about waging war on the wrong enemy, on behalf of keeping the American people safe. It’s about expanding empire for a set of global elite who dominate the planet with their transnational corporations and banking institutions, and who use the wealth and military might of the United States to do it.
Gall asserts, however, that Pakistan has been the main source of terrorism, especially since they were hiding Osama bin Laden for ten years. The Taliban was “regrouping and resting” she said, and from Pakistan they could more easily attack the Americans by sneaking into and out of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the bureaucrats in Washington just didn’t catch on in time, otherwise they could have decided against burning villages in Afghanistan and focused on how to root out terrorism in Pakistan.
That’s all fine if you believe in that framework: that the president of the United States makes his own decisions with his advisers, and Congress weighs the idea of invading other nations with heavy hearts, and by their own consciences. But if you zoom out to a wider framework, the choice to embroil the nation into an unending invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was not an accident.
Gall says top Pakistani officials knew where bin Laden was, and they were hiding him. This is what fueled the war in Afghanistan as America’s worldwide intelligence gathering network was deceived and thought bin Laden and his failing kidneys were living in a cave. Yet, this doesn’t add up when you think about the CIA presence in Pakistan, as well as the fact that bin Laden was a CIA operative in the 80s, named Tim Osman. He was the leader of the US-created Mujahideen, and handled by the CIA to fight against the Soviet invasion. Do you think US intelligence really lost track of him?
Afghanistan has always been a place where nations want control. It’s a perfect strategic command point for geo-political aims. Great Britain tried to take it. Russia tried to take it. Now, the controllers of the United States of America are taking it through more than a trillion dollars of taxpayer money, and by exhausting our troops and enmeshing them in an immoral, unending battle.
Opium production in Afghanistan is at an all-time high. American troops seem to be protecting the narcotic crop. The revenue flow is what some intelligence officers believe is the only element keeping the major global banks afloat as their pages of derivative exposure comes due.
Invading Afghanistan was not an accident or a misstep. The Pentagon had plans all along, and had set firm goals for full control of the Middle East, with their final target being Iran. That would also help to isolate Russia and collapse any influence they had in the world. The neo-con think tank, Project for a New American Century, called for a “new Pearl Harbor” to rally the American public behind a significant ramping up of missile and military advancement, and the subsequent invasion of nations overseas.
They got their new Pearl Harbor in 9/11, whether by luck or by prodding behind the scenes, or by staging the event itself.
The Iraq invasion was also not a dumb move by an administration run by a buffoon. It was premeditated, as General Wesley Clark told Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!. “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran,” is what Pentagon officials told him back in 2001.
It’s no mistake that Jeremy Scahill reported a huge CIA compound in Somalia, along with unreported drone strikes being carried out on terrorist targets. The same has been happening in Yemen. We all know the Obama administration infamously told Congress they had no right to question them about the heavy air assault they laid on Libya when Colonel Ghadafi was under siege by his own people. “No boots on the ground!” the president exclaimed. Just a blanket bombing campaign that killed untold numbers of Libyans.
The seven countries did not fall neatly in five years, as plans do not always go uninterrupted by setbacks and problems. But they are still underway and happening more covertly since Obama took office. This was not a George W Bush initiative. This was a bigger plan and not a case of mistakenly attacking Iraq, or Afghanistan either, for that matter.
Missing the mark on Pakistan was not because of befuddlement or fumbling around in the dark about who to attack.
[George W Bush, speaking about global terrorism, photo by Kimberlee Hewitt; opium field by Hugh Chevallier]
There are no comments at the moment, do you want to add one?
Write a comment