THE
"MISSION" - CANADA'S AFGHAN ADVENTURE
(The
following article is from
the February 1-15,
2008
issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles
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By Anthony Black
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 unsavoury 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 funnelling 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.
Found
at:
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint11/06_THE_MISSION_-_CANADA'S_AFGHAN_ADVENTURE.html