America … the Liberation of Afghanistan

Despite the admission of the failure of the American war in Afghanistan and the happiness that this announcement brings, U.S. President Barack Obama still claims that the strategy is going in the right direction and won’t exchange it for a different strategy.

Beyond what was announced in 2009, American policy will continue as it is, to the same level of efficiency. For example, the U.S. continues to agree with Pakistan and praise it to the skies even though it possesses nuclear weapons, which were in fact built with U.S. support.

Perhaps what is revealed by WikiLeaks about Afghanistan and also about the war on terror clearly shows the direction of the American strategy toward the world in general and this region in particular. Al-Qaida did not arrange these crises, and the appearance that victory is not possible over the so-called terrorism looms on the horizon in this time of an increase in the number of victims, particularly on the American side. 2010 was a bloody year for U.S. forces.

However, it seems that those who continue unjust wars, delaying the realization of even limited goals, do not care about the price or the number of victims, as long as they benefit.

The war in Afghanistan has become unacceptable to Afghans who have been burned by it and who have watched the destruction, desolation and killing that fill their country. Furthermore, in the West voices rise, demanding an end to this war because in the end the damage to their credibility in the region will catch up with them. The power of the opposition — voices such as that of Eric Margolis who gave an interview criticizing this war and the expenses incurred by it — was published on the website Antiwar.com. Margolis said, “The United States spends seven billion dollars a month on its occupation of Afghanistan, not counting the additional billions spent to try to build an obedient Afghan army, and the payment of money to Pakistani politicians and generals.”* Another time he said that President Barack Obama shows painfully that he does not hold the reins of American foreign policy, as the generals and the victorious Republicans in Congress cynically pledge to begin withdrawing some U.S. troops from Afghanistan by July 2011.

The writer observes that Obama wants to get out of the quagmire of Afghanistan, but he lacks the courage to implement the withdrawal, and his final effort to send 30,000 additional troops to the battlefield has so far failed to win the crucial battles they hoped for. Otherwise, they work in favor of the war, including the Pentagon and the arms industry, and the Republicans and Yemenis, all combined to frustrate the attempts to close the chapter of the war.

Add to that American politicians and NATO, who are afraid to recognize today that the war was a tremendous waste of lives, money, and that wealth and political fortunes are hanging in the balance.

While the United States becomes more and more involved in the war, their allies are tired of reaching out, feeling that they have been involved in total war against the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan, affected by the memories of the disorder of the adoption of the so-called peace processes in the colonial 19th century.

This is why the new French Defense Minister Alain Juppe described the Afghan conflict as a quagmire, calling for an identification of an exit strategy. The pretext used by the United States to invade Afghanistan was the elimination of al-Qaida, accused of the bombings in September 2001 in New York City. But now that there are only fleeing remnants [of al-Qaida] why is there still a need for a few hundred Pakistani troops, 110,000 U.S. troops and 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan?

Certainly this reason is not building a nation or, as they claim, ridding the Afghans from their poverty and ignorance. Reports show that Afghanistan is in as deep of poverty as it was before the invasion. Rather, the reason is a fear of failure, which prompted the United States to use the same methods used by their punitive ally Israel in the occupied West Bank: assassinations, death squads and the demolition of houses and entire neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip by aircraft and tanks.

The U.S. military is determined not to let the Afghan tribesmen defeat its armed forces. Defeat in Afghanistan would raise the demands for deep cuts in the bloated military budget, estimated at 50 percent of the volume of world military spending.

The failure in Afghanistan would threaten the entire NATO, which has been the main tool used to control the geopolitics of Europe since the end of World War II in the 1940s.

Will the fate of the U.S. occupation forces be the same as the Soviet armies that came out of Afghanistan in 1989, and which led to the former Soviet Union’s collapse and disintegration? Americans fear this, especially since Afghanistan has been known as a cemetery for invaders throughout its long history, and the Taliban are not international terrorists, but a resistance to the occupation of the West and the U.S.

*Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.