USA's Multi-Decade Campaign of Imperial Terror Against Afghanistan
By Robert Barsocchini
10 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org
This is an update to my examination of the USA's decades-long campaign of brutal imperial violence and terror against Afghanistan.
Brief summary of the entire campaign:
- Starting in the mid to late 70s, the USA started sponsoring extremist Islamic terrorism against civilians in Afghanistan, to provoke the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan to protect its client government, under which women actually had rights .
- The US-backed terrorists succeeded in driving out the Soviet-backed government in a brutal war
- The USA then supported the formation of a terrorist, Sharia-law dictatorship out of the US-terrorist-proxy forces: the Taliban
- The USA, under Bush 1 and Clinton, supported the Taliban for years, suppressing information about its extreme crimes against humanity, and particularly women, while trying to get the Taliban to expand to cover all of Afghanistan, and unsuccessfully trying to get the Taliban to submit to US dictates on US gas projects in Afghanistan, until:
- 9/11/01. An official negotiator predicted the USA would violently invade Afghanistan regardless of whether the Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden, and would use the US military (propagandizing it and the public with various slogans) to pursue the energy project that was the point of the USA's campaign of violence against Afghan civilians from the beginning.
- The USA immediately did exactly that, and continues doing it to this day, under Obama, who wants to keep troops in Afghanistan indefinitely to guarantee security for the pipeline, as expressed specifically by both Obama and Hillary Clinton . (The US public finances all this, while a couple of US dirty-energy company heads will personally collect many, many millions in profits.)
- Under international law, is it aggression, the world's worst crime, to support an armed group in attacks against a state, and terrorism to support an armed group in attacks against civilians. The USA did both to Afghanistan, and, to date, its imperial campaign has killed 830,000 to over 1.5 million Afghans, mostly civilians, and wounded and displaced millions more. Under international law, specifically defined at Nuremberg, the USA bears responsibility for this, and the leaders involved - from Carter to Obama - must be prosecuted for mass murder.
- See full article for details and sources. Sources include officials, diplomats, experts, and reports in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and Salon, as well as British state-controlled media outlet, BBC. Everything presented is public, documented fact, not speculation.
And here is the latest update on the reason for the USA's campaign of extremist violence against Afghans since the late 70s, its desire to take control of, and profit handsomely from, natural resources:
The US plutocracy , currently figure-headed by Obama, is still pushing forward with the Afghan pipeline project, clawing for two major US fossil fuel-exploiting companies to clinch it, and blatantly excluding non-US-empire-aligned Iran. Their goal is to strengthen the US stranglehold over Middle East energy resources, recognized by US planners, in 1945, to be a "stupendous" source of wealth and strategic power.
As Mike Whitney puts it :
[T]he State Department applies [its] muscle and “Voila”, Chevron and Exxon clinch the deal. How's that for a free market?
And who do you think is going to protect that 1,000 mile stretch of pipeline through hostile Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?
Why US troops, of course, which is why US military bases are conveniently located up an down the pipeline route. Coincidence?
Not on your life.
This is simply a continuation of US colonizers using their armies of brainwashed young people to commit murder and die for the purpose of stealing and securing resources on Native American land, then land all around the world, as today in Afghanistan and elsewhere, for the benefit of an obscenely wealthy few, who bathe in the blood of thousands upon thousands of innocent people. The USA has simply expanded its imperial colonizing globally since conquering the North American continent.
Remember, when resources were discovered on land that was promised to be left to the Native Americans, the US colonizers would suddenly "need" to seize it for, of course, "national security" reasons, which is why almost nothing was left to the Natives. See here for a time-lapse animation of the US annexation of the North American continent.
This Nazi-like culture of brutal imperialism has gone virtually undeterred and simply expanded to do carry out its exploitation campaigns globally, killing millions in the process, as we see in the example of Afghanistan and hundreds of other countries.
Whitney goes on:
This is the . anarchic “Mad Max” template Washington is applying wherever it intervenes. The intention is to dissolve the nation-state in order to remove any obstacle to resource extraction, which is why failed states are popping up wherever the US sticks its big nose. It's all by design. Chaos is the objective. Simply put: It's easier to steal whatever one wants when there's no center of power to resist.
He discusses how the US has employed this model in Ukraine, as well, where US-picked junta leaders such as "Yats" (Yatsenyuk) are now "giving away the farm", Ukraine's gas, to US companies.
US corporations will be able to buy up nearly half of a pipeline that moves 60 percent of the gas that flows from Russia to Europe. That's what you call a tollbooth . and US companies will be in just the right spot to gouge Moscow for every drop of natural gas that transits those pipelines.
Here, he illustrates the superfluous, criminal, murderous and lecherous role the US plutocracy is playing in the relationship between Russia and Europe:
Europe and Russia are a perfect fit. Europe needs gas to heat its homes and run its machinery. Russia has gas to sell and needs the money to strengthen its economy. It's a win-win situation. What Europe and Russia don't need is the United States. In fact, the US is the problem. As long as US meddling persists, there's going to be social unrest, division, and war. It's that simple. So the goal should be to undermine Washington's ability to conduct these destabilizing operations and force US policymakers to mind their own freaking business. That means there should be a concerted effort to abandon the dollar, ditch US Treasuries, jettison the petrodollar system, and force the US to become a responsible citizen that complies with International law.
It won't happen overnight, but it will happen, mainly because everyone is sick and tired of all the troublemaking.
However, as Whitney has noted elsewhere, the US plutocracy will kill and impoverish many, many more people as it flails to maintain is global empire , so we must pursue all non-violent avenues to mitigate the death, destruction, and terror.
Robert Barsocchini is an historical researcher, investigative journalist , and writer for the film industry.
Comments are moderated