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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 8/28/21

Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America's Involvement in Afghanistan

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Chris Floyd
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From Empire Burelesque

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? -- Matthew 12:34

Rumsfeld Bush Cheney.
Rumsfeld Bush Cheney.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Cherie A. Thurlby     Alternative names)
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I.
People need to understand something about Afghanistan, and the debacle we're witnessing there. America's involvement in Afghanistan didn't begin in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks. It began in the last years of the Carter Administration, when he and his advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski set out to "give the Soviets their own Vietnam." They did this by funding and arming an international cohort of violent fundamentalist extremists and training them in terror tactics. (Osama bin Laden was one of those who joined this jihad army supported by the US, Saudia Arabia and Pakistan.)

At that time, there was a modern, secular regime in Afghanistan. It wasn't a paradise. It was ridden by internal factionalism, sometimes violent. It was supported by the Soviet Union. It was beset by fundamentalist extremists. It had repressive features. But it was a secular regime. Women were emancipated; many held high positions. Children, including girls, were educated. Science was honored and promoted. Religion was tolerated, albeit uneasily.

Carter and Brzezinski decided to empower the extremist militias attacking the regime, hoping to induce so much chaos that the Soviets would intervene militarily to help their client state. Again, as Brzezinski himself put it, they wanted to give the USSR "its own Vietnam."

Think about this for a moment. What Carter and Brzezinski wanted was to subject the Afghan people to the years of suffering and death that the Vietnamese had experienced. They WANTED Afghanistan to suffer this fate, and they ACTED to make sure it happened. And it did. If you like, it was one of the great successes of US foreign policy in the post-war period. They deliberately plunged Afghanistan into blood-soaked chaos; and the Soviets - after fierce debate in the Politburo - did send in troops to try to stabilize the country. What followed was year after year after year of horror and death. Again, please note: this was the stated INTENTION of US policy: mass death, terrorism and suffering.

When Carter lost in 1980, Reagan took up his policy in Afghanistan and magnified it. More arms and money to religious extremists. More terrorist training, with CIA manuals. The US even produced textbooks for Afghan children lauding fundamentalist extremism and jihad terror. (All of this was reported in the Washington Post and other mainstream outlets.) Reagan invited the precursors of the Taliban to the White House, where he called them the "moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers" and "freedom fighters." These men were dedicated to undoing the emancipation of women, destroying all vestiges of secular society and imposing the most harsh and hidebound fundamentalist strictures imaginable.

These were the people who were armed, trained, funded, lauded and supported by the United States government for years on end. The Taliban would not exist if not for these long-running, bipartisan policies of the United States.

II.
At last, the Soviets were bled dry, as Carter and Reagan intended, and pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving ruin and chaos behind. There followed years of civil war between atrocious warlords who tortured and looted the Afghan people. The Taliban arose from the midst of the extremists backed by the United States. They managed to take over the country in the early 1990s. They were then supported by the United States once again. Taliban members came to Texas seeking business deals under then-Governor George W. Bush. They sent representatives to Washington, meeting mostly with Republican leaders. When Bush was president, he hooked up with the Taliban in drug eradication efforts.

As noted, Osama bin Laden had been part of the US-backed extremist jihad against the secular regime. However, when the US stationed troops in his homeland of Saudi Arabia during the first Iraq War, he and other fundamentalists regarded this as a profanation of the holy land and vowed to drive American troops from Saudi Arabia. This was the main purpose behind al-Qaeda's terror attacks, which culminated on 9/11: an attack carried out almost entirely by Saudi nationals, with no involvement of the Taliban or any Afghan citizens.

Bin Laden, a hero of the extremists' triumph over the USSR, was by now back in Afghanistan. After the 9/11 attacks -- which the US itself has said occurred without any foreknowledge by the Taliban -- the Taliban offered several times to turn Bin Laden over to international justice in some accredited forum. Bush adamantly refused to even entertain the offer, and launched a full-scale military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

As is well known, just after the attack, the Bush Administration launched a frantic, extraordinary effort to spirit many top Saudi figures out of the United States. It could be noted here that the Bush family had long-standing business ties with the Saudis, including the Bin Laden family. (Indeed, Osama bin Laden's father died in a plane crash in Texas while doing business there.)

In any case, the war was on. Although bin Laden and his forces were seemingly trapped in their mountain fortress early on, somehow they managed to escape to Pakistan, where bin Laden lived untroubled for many years.

By 2002, the Taliban regime had fallen. But the "nation-building" efforts of the United States very soon took a backseat to the goal that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (and Jeb Bush, among others) had publicly announced before Dubya's election: war on Iraq. A Cheney-Rumsfeld group called "Project for the New American Century" laid out its plans before the 2000 election, calling for massive new military expenditures, extensive new military operations overseas and war on Iraq. The PNAC document clearly stated that they realized it would be very difficult to achieve this wholesale militarization of US society and policy, unless - their words, in 2000 -- the American people were "catalyzed" by a "new Pearl Harbor."

In 2003, massive military resources and political attention were shifted from Afghanistan to the real war that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted: Iraq. It would be tedious to recite all the deceptions they practiced to perpetrate their deliberate, knowing lie about "Iraqi WMDs" or the collusion of Democrats like Biden in furthering the war fever. The war came and we all know what happened. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died, the whole region became destablized, thousands became radicalized by the death and torture visited upon their lands, and vast, almost incomprehensible levels of corruption attended every aspect of the long, bloody American occupation.

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Chris Floyd is the Editor and co-founder of Atlantic Free Press. He is an American journalist now based in Great Britain and the UK correspondent for Truthout.org. For 10 years, he wrote the weekly Global Eye political column for The Moscow Times (more...)
 
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