2-04-08, 1:53 pm

Original Source: People's Voice

Much like Washington's invasion and occupation of Iraq – which began in Act 1 as an operation to 'root out weapons of mass destruction', changed wardrobe in Act 2 to 'bringing democracy to the heathens', and transmogrified seamlessly in Act 3 to 'blaming the chaos on the victims' – so too has the 'mission' in Afghanistan morphed in its stated aims from one outrageous lie to the next.

Osama Who?

Operation Enduring Freedom thus started out ostensibly as a campaign of righteous vengeance to bring Osama bin Laden to heel; a campaign whose logical status would have been slightly less risible had, first, any of the alleged 9/11 hijackers been Afghani (14 of the 19 were Saudis, 1 was Egyptian, 2 were Lebananese, and 2 were from the United Arab Emirates); second, had the isolationist Taliban had any prior knowledge of the attack (it was planned in Germany); and, third, had not the Taliban agreed to turn bin Laden over to an independent, international court of justice upon seeing evidence of his guilt (an offer spurned by the Bush regime, a fact, thereafter, entirely elided from the 'free press').

But, of course, the missing 'Osama bin Laden' was no more the point of this colonial/imperial exercise than had been the missing 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq. And so, slowly but surely, 'Osama' vanished from the mission's raison d'etre – almost as if he had never been. So began Act 2.

To Order: One Demonization Campaign


Having conveniently failed to capture bin Laden – a contrary result which would, in any case, have put a certain damper, you understand, on the fraudulent 'war on terror' – the Bush regime and its allies didn't skip a beat in proffering a new and improved rationale for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, i.e. regime change. After all, the Taliban were, by all accounts, an unsavory lot dedicated to denying women's rights and blowing up archaeological monuments and such, so it seemed like a propaganda winner all the way 'round.

The only fly in the ointment, of course, was that the Taliban were actually our former allies. Indeed, they were part of the mujahideen, the famous 'freedom fighters' lionized in headline after headline on virtually every front page of every newspaper throughout North America and Europe for an entire decade (the '80's). Not only that, but the Taliban had, despite their obvious theocratic and anti-progressive drawbacks, a thing or two going for them. Thus, they had brought not only peace and stability (after a brutal civil war and period of total lawlessness following the exit of the Soviets) but had also virtually wiped out Afghanistan's poppy cultivation and so its contribution to the world heroin trade. Moreover, their former anti-Soviet comrades-in-arms, the so-called Northern Alliance (our present allies) were, if anything, more bloodthirsty – and certainly less disciplined – than the Taliban. It was these warlords, for instance, who, vying for control of Kabul in 1993/4 following the Soviet departure in 1989, decimated the city and killed a cool 50,000 or so civilians.

Still, these trifles could not deter an august free press on the war path. The Taliban would have to go and if the historical context and the facts didn't quite fit the moral case at hand – in truth, didn't fit it at all – well, to hell with them.

Brzezinski's Chessboard

Now mind you, these changing rationales and justifications for the invasion and then occupation of Afghanistan – now since mutated into the amorphous mouthwash of 'women's rights,' 'peace', and 'reconstruction' etc. – in no way reflected the mission's actual military aims. There the strategy was, from the beginning, all of a piece, i.e. 1) to secure the country as forward base for the projection of military power into Central Asia, 2) to provide a stepping stone (in cahoots with the invasion of Iraq) towards the retaking of Iran and, 3) to permit the building of a gas and oil pipeline from the Caspian Basin through to Pakistan and thence to the Arabian Sea. And, of course, none of these aims were a secret in the sense that there aren't plenty of official documents to substantiate them. There are. Nor were they obscure in the sense of their not being part of a logically transparent narrative. They were entirely transparent.

Indeed, to see just how explicit some of these global strategic motives can be one need only repair to that Cold War classic, 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Geostrategic Imperatives' by Zbigniew Brzezinski wherein the beginning of the whole modern Afghan debacle is laid out in black and white.

In 'The Grand Chessboard' Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, and star consultant to several US Administrations) boasts of how he lured the Soviets into Afghanistan in order to bleed them in their own version of Vietnam. To this end Carter, in July 1979, authorized $500 million to set up what was basically a terrorist organization – comprised of a ragtag group of feudal warlords, drug barons and Muslim extremists – dedicated to overthrowing the secular Afghan government. It was only following the implementation of this armed destabilization campaign that the Soviets, partly in response to calls from assistance from Kabul and partly to protect their own strategic interests, 'invaded.' The CIA subsequently cranked up the 'mujahideen' resistance by funneling them billions of dollars worth of arms largely through the auspices of the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) apparatus.

Ten years on, the country in ruins and a million or so Afghanis dead, Brzezinski's plan bore ultimate fruit. The Soviets, exhausted from the Nazi holocaust, 70 years of world capitalist economic siege, 40 years of having been arms raced to death by the US and, now, from having suffered la piece de resistance of their own 'Vietnam' – finally collapsed. The United States, released from the strictures of Cold War containment, immediately embarked on an ambitious project of imperial expansion which included, successively, the Invasion of Panama, the First Gulf War/Massacre, the Invasion of Somalia, and the destabilization, bombing and ultimate destruction of Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, back in the rubble, the mujahideen were fighting it out amongst themselves for control of Afghanistan. Following a brutal civil war one faction, the Taliban (named after a group of religious students, 'talibs'), finally gained the upper hand and formed a fundamentalist theocratic and rigidly patriarchal state. Nonetheless, they also brought order to the country and so it wasn't long before United Oil Company of California (Unocal) came calling in aid of building the vital, and long sought after, pipeline from the Caspian through to the Arabian Sea. Negotiations were proceeding apace when, unexpectedly, in the spring of 2001 – and just months before 9/11 – they broke down. Unocal immediately made submissions to Congress suggesting that 'regime change' would be most desirable. The rest, as they say, is history.

The 'Just War'

What I always found particularly fascinating about the initial invasion of Afghanistan was the manner in which it was reported. Never have I seen such a look of unrestrained glee in the eyes of so many of our TV news men and women as they detailed the slaughter of the Taliban. One got the distinct impression of morally deficient children lauding the annihilation of insects. In truth, militarily, that's more or less what happened.

We'll never know exactly how many Afghanis were killed in the first wave of the attack. No one seems much to care in any case. Figures of 10,000 or so have been bandied about, but these are almost certainly a gross underestimate. As the Irish filmmaker Jamie Doran detailed in his documentary, 'Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death,' there were, following the siege of Kunduz, roughly 3,000 or so prisoners murdered by US Special Forces and their Northern Alliance cadres in one instance alone. In another incident, at Mazur-i-Sharif, upwards of 800 Taliban prisoners were killed – most with their hands tied behind their backs, and by US helicopter gunships firing down at them in a closed compound – whilst 'attempting to escape.' In the latter case there was a clear line of evidence linking statements by the Bush Administration (i.e. in regard to not taking prisoners etc) to the massacre. The ever servile press filed it, as per usual, first under 'blaming the victim,' then under 'total amnesia for disturbing facts.'

Such, then, is the moral fibre of the collaborative enterprise that Canada has signed onto in its present occupation of Afghanistan.

Colonial Aftermath

Following the initial, and as it turns out highly tenuous, 'pacification' of the country, the usual and expected colonial machinations were deployed. Thus, by late 2002 the 1500 kilometre Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline deal had been signed. Harmid Karzai, an ex-Unocal consultant, was eventually installed, via rigged elections, as the new puppet ruler of Afghanistan. The majority of the 'elected' MPs of the new government turned out to be, surprise, ex-drug and feudal war lords, and stand accused of having carried out massacres, mass rape, and assorted war crimes.

The Northern Alliance have continued on their merry way, reviving poppy cultivation such that, today, Afghanistan supplies 80 to 90% of the world's heroin. As for the much ballyhooed 'rebuilding' effort, only 3% of all the foreign aid spent in the country has been for reconstruction. Canada, for its part, has now spent over $4 billion dollars on its Afghan mission – and 90% of that has been directed towards military ends. Indeed, much of the rest is for bloated contracts to Western corporations with little or no accountability. Meanwhile, the civilian casualties have, since the invasion began, mounted into the thousands per year – and this is likely a gaping underestimate if one factors in the dismal infant and nutritionally related mortality rates. Women's rights, moreover, though 'legally' sanctioned, remain in reality as bad as they ever were under the Taliban; this compounded by the complete lack of security leading to endemic rape.

Finally, one especially baneful aspect of Canada's involvement in this ongoing colonial war crime is that it is fuelling, not only Canada's military integration into the United States war machine, but our general political and economic integration as well.

Still, when all is said and done, Hillier and Harper can pound their little chests. They have their little war, and can hold their heads high where it counts – in Washington.

From People's Voice