Twelve Years of NATO in Afghanistan: A Historic Failure

No celebrations have occurred on the anniversary of a war that, conveniently, is now “forgotten,” despite the fact that Afghanistan remains occupied by 66,000 troops and its people are still dying because of the conflict.

On Oct. 7, 2001, the broadest military coalition in history — made up of 50 countries — bombarded the second-most underdeveloped country on the planet, whose military arsenal did not contain a single aircraft with which to defend itself. In the first three months alone, NATO bomber planes dropped 10,000 tons of bombs on the Afghans, roasting them over a blanket of snow and cold. Thousands were buried under the rubble of their adobe shacks, while millions fled with nowhere to run to — barefoot, terrorized and hungry. Eleven years later, the displacement of civilians in the north of the country was up 40 percent over the previous year. So much silence about war crimes! The allies’ intelligent devices destroyed water deposits, electrical power plants, crops and livestock — even the Kabul Zoo! — and caused a muted human catastrophe. Meanwhile, euphoric Euro-MPs waved the “Save women from the burqa” banner — the same MPs who today parade Malala, the Pakistani girl, to prove the barbarous nature of the Taliban, drawing a dense smokescreen over U.S. drone attacks, which frequently snuff out the lives of dozens of children and adults.

When NATO thought that the Afghans were better off dead than alive — killed by cluster bombs or radioactive ammunition in quantities greater than the total used in the Gulf War and the Balkans War together — share prices in Lockheed Martin, the world’s leading arms manufacturer, increased 15-fold.

Barack Obama, the U.S. president, has set a date of 2014 for the withdrawal of troops. Why are they leaving?

The official reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan — once again living up to its name, Land of Tears — and its subsequent occupation by 300,000 soldiers and foreign mercenaries, were the following:

• To avenge the 9/11 attacks, though not one of the terrorists was an Afghan.

• To destroy the terrorists’ hideout and capture bin Laden. Why, then, with the Saudi Arabian bin Laden officially dead, did the U.S. stay in Afghanistan, and why is Washington (along with Spain!) still today negotiating with Kabul to stay on after 2014?

• To bring down the Taliban al-Qaida government and install democracy for a “primitive” people. So why is the United States negotiating with those barbarians in Qatar, with offers of power-sharing in various regions of the country? Why were they paying the Taliban huge bribes during those years, as they now admit?

• To put an end to the opium trade. Well! According to the United Nations, Afghan heroin production went up from 185 tons in 2001 to 5,800 in 2012. How is it that the government that the United States installed is actually the biggest legal drug trafficker in the world?

A piece at a time, the truth came out: “We can’t withdraw from Afghanistan now. It has billions of dollars’ worth of minerals,”* said Gen. David Petraeus, the Director of the CIA until he was “resigned” for infidelity to his wife, along with Gen. Allen, who was responsible for NATO in Afghanistan. They both opposed Obama’s plans to withdraw, among other differences of opinion. And his frank confession that German troops were in Afghanistan to safeguard the economic and commercial interests of the attacking countries cost even German President Horst Köhler his job.

• The temptation to plunder the Afghans’ natural wealth. The Afghan subsoil, along with anti-personnel mines and mass graves, houses a thousand mineral mines — iron, copper, cobalt, gold, lead, bauxite, tantalum, emeralds, rubies, silver, coal and lithium (used in electric batteries) — reckoned to be worth $1 trillion, a fact made known by the Soviets in the 1960s. In 2001 it was already known that this was the Asian Congo. Moscow had plans to build an oil refinery capable of producing half a million tons per year and a smelting complex for the Aynak copper deposit, one of the largest in the world, currently being exploited by China. NATO admits this: There was oil in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan provided the only viable route to transport gas from Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea. Strategic control of energy routes is part of Washington’s agenda. But the TAPI (Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India) Pipeline, which was to link the Caspian Sea with the Indian Ocean, together with the millions of dollars oil nations and Western oil companies invested in the building of the duct, have been abandoned, because of sabotage by the Taliban and the countries that would be affected.

• To turn Afghanistan into a great military base in the heart of Central Asia, in proximity to China, Russia and Iran.

• To promote a new opium war, not only to destroy the social fabric of rival countries in the region but also to pocket the proceeds of the Afghan drug trade, which turns over about $150 billion annually, some of which ends up in Western banking institutions. Cultivation of the opium poppy is 35 times greater since the occupation began. The United States has used the drug money to finance terrorist groups like the Afghan Mujahedeen, the Nicaraguan Contras and the Kuomintang in Mao’s China.

A Historic Failure

Not one of these objectives was realized, partly because of these reasons:

1. The popular discontent aroused by NATO’s continual bombardment of weddings, funerals and schools; the uncensured attacks on homes, detention, humiliation, torture, rape and murder of civilians, including, on occasions, urination over the dead bodies and posts of videos depicting the crimes on the Internet. It is the relatives of these people who make attempts on the lives of their trans-Atlantic saviors. Obama is relying on U.S. impunity when he asks the Afghan government to allow his troops to stay beyond 2014 in exchange for his promise to back whichever crime syndicate takes its turn in power. There are 10 secret, private prisons like Guantanamo in Afghan territory.

2. A weak and corrupt government composed of religious and ethnic minorities, whose power extends no further than the presidential palace and which a significant part of the population opposes. In reality, the United States has obstructed the growth of strong nation states in the countries it has invaded, and has even brought about their fragmentation. Consider Yugoslavia, Iraq — where Kurdistan enjoys autonomous status — and Sudan, which was divided in two.

3. The impossibility of negotiating with and controlling the insurgents — who had fragmented into various autonomous groups — and, at this stage of the game, of convincing the Afghans of the allies’ good intentions, especially with their superficial and simplistic view of a highly complex country, its social fabric, its psychology and its needs.

4. The difficulties that the United States experienced in Iraq from 2005 onward, which allowed the Taliban to regroup and embark on an asymmetric war with improvised explosive devices. They now control a substantial part of the country.

5. The United States’ policy of staying aloof from Pakistan in order to attract India’s cooperation in containing China and installing a pro-Indian president, Hamid Karzai, in Kabul — which almost cost Karzai his life in an assassination attempt. The ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service and godmother to a majority of insurgent groups, has not forgiven this strategic U-turn by the United States and does not intend to allow any unsympathetic regime in Kabul. Start a war against Pakistan from Afghanistan? No, that would be an act of lunacy that Obama would not commit.

6. The conflict of interests between the United States and its allies, who gradually began to desert the U.S., militarily and politically, in that territory mired in troubles.

7. The economic crisis that forbids a deployment of that size.

Obama and His ‘Light Footprint’

“Light footprint” and “coercive diplomacy” are approaches designed by John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, both Vietnam veterans, who advocate covert action — the use of drones or cyberwarfare — over military intervention. Following changes implemented in the U.S. defense leadership and the attempt to demilitarize the CIA, Obama wants wars to be decided in the West Wing of the White House, not the Pentagon. The failure of Petraeus’ policy of “Afghanizing” security — that is, training and empowering the native military — was accompanied by an increase in “green-on-blue” attacks (a term which comes from a war game in which the blue forces are the allies, the red forces are the enemy and the green is the nation under attack) which have left many dead, destroyed the morale of the enlisted troops and left Obama without a viable plan to defend. To make matters worse, hundreds of soldiers have deserted to join the ranks of the rebels. The plan to create a proxy army in Afghanistan is at an end.

Obama, who once thought to win the war and now only wants to end the nightmare decorously, is negotiating with Kabul the acquisition of nine mega military bases and impunity for his soldiers, while Moscow protests the use of Afghan soil for military purposes on the expiry of the U.N. mandate.

The fact that Pakistan has emerged the big winner of this war is of great concern to India, which is trying to mitigate its devastating effects with the help of the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) alliance, particularly with China. BRICS included “Attention to Afghanistan” on the agenda for its IV Summit in 2012 and subsequently began to sign all manner of cooperation agreements with Afghanistan.

In the end, success has come with neither “surgical” attacks nor “light footprints” — but instead with the ancient Chinese practice of acupuncture: China now dominates the Afghan economy, despite NATO’s overwhelming presence.

The chaos will continue.

* Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.