America’s Shambles in Afghanistan

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

In the course of research for a paper on US-Pakistan relations I came across a speech given by President Obama in March this year, titled ‘A New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan’. It was interesting and quite informative, if misguided and engagingly ingenuous, but the riveting sentence that leapt from the page to my astonished eyes was the declaration that “The United States of America did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan.”

It’s a bit like being told “Hitler didn’t cause World War Two”, or reading a newspaper headline like “Republican Politician Tells Truth” or “Netanyahu Says Arabs are Human” But the Obama assertion was even more bizarre.

Nobody grabbed America’s collective nose and ordered it to send special forces to go to Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region on 7 October 2001, along with a few dozen British colleagues and a now-rich bunch of raggy baggy Afghan warlords who took millions of CIA dollars in enormous shrink-wrapped bundles and then sat down on their money and did nothing – until they sent the cash to Dubai and Geneva, courtesy of the corrupt Kabul Bank. The prime mover in that farce (for such it was, alas, in spite of instances of exceptionally courageous conduct by US and British soldiers; I have had a first-hand description of the operation, but alas can’t recount it because of the UK’s Official Secrets Act), was the White House. The pathetic Blair of Britain followed in his usual fashion, desperate to have bonding photographs taken alongside the grinning Bush.

It was most certainly the United States of America that chose to invade Afghanistan. And it was the United States that manipulated the United Nations Security Council into a Resolution that seemed to give justification for its unwinnable war.

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Source: http://www.counterpunch.com