Afghanistan

neglected?

fast fall was both slow diplomacy bottom up but alsocascade amplify fdbk

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HUH? AN 12 25

President Donald Trump's administration is being sharply criticized by conservatives in both government and media for reportedly sending tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban-controlled government in Afghanistan.

Newsweek reported Tuesday that, according to Amrullah Saleh, (who leads the anti-Taliban political party Afghanistan Green Trend) the Trump administrationflew $45 million in cash to Afghanistan on Monday. Saleh's group alleged that the money was "flown in via a chartered flight by Moalem Airlines," which is based in Kyrgyzstan.

The post caught the attention of conservative commentator Ann Vandersteel, who said of the cash payment "this is not America First" but rather "America deceived." Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who is a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, responded to Vandersteel's post by adding that the massive cash shipments to the Taliban are happening "every week." He then called on the U.S. Senate to "pass my bill."

Burchett's legislation — the "No Tax Dollars for Terrorists Act" — passed the House of Representatives in June, and would empower the U.S. State Department to identify and publish the names of every organization providing financial support to the Taliban-controlled government.

"The United States has sent over $5 billion in cash to Kabul. It is the duty of the State Department to ensure that any aid from the United States is kept out of the hands of terrorists in Afghanistan. The terrorists can hate us for free," Burchett stated after the bill was passed.

Burchett has been a vocal proponent of cutting off U.S. cash shipments to Afghanistan ever since U.S. troops withdrew from the war-torn country in 2021. The issue has also attracted interest from MAGA influencers in close proximity to Trump, like unofficial "loyalty enforcer" Laura Loomer.

"Why is the United States still funding the Taliban?" Loomer wrote on Tuesday. "What the hell do our reps do all day aside from ruin our country and the world?"

"Because we are crooked Laura," Burchett responded.

Click here to read Newsweek's full article.

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KIA 2 NAT GD dc?

NOTE TAKES TPS FROM AFGHAN TRANSLATORS SAME TIME?!

an 5 25

MAGA is furious at the Episcopal Church for refusing a directive from the federal government to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status.

Newsweek reports the church submitted its refusal days after almost 50 South Africans arrived at a U.S. airport under a fast-tracked refugee program that appears to only serve white south Afrikaners. Other groups, including Black Sudanese refugees fleeing religious violence — who are also from Africa — are not similarly fast-tracked.

The new arrivals are minority descendants of mainly Dutch and French colonial settlers who created the segregationist system of apartheid in 1948, which allows white people to legally steal land and resources from the majority Black population, who were relocated to segregated overcrowded, townships of lean-tos and shacks.

Data show 73 percent of privately owned land in South Africa is white-owned despite white people comprising only 7 percent of the population. In corporate South Africa, white individuals also occupy 62 percent of top management positions while 17 percent of leadership roles are held by Black managers.

IFrame Content

Critics say Trump’s decision to expedite resettlement of Afrikaners bypasses an onerous refugee system that leaves thousands from conflict zones stuck in a years-long vetting processes and dangerous conditions.

Rev. Sean W. Rowe, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, confirmed in a letter to church members that the government contacted the church and expected it to resettle some of the South Africans under terms of a grant. But Rowe said the request posed a moral dilemma for the Episcopal Church, which has deep ties to the Anglican Church of Southern Africa and counts the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu — an outspoken apartheid opponent — among its spiritual forebears.

"In light of our church's steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step," Rowe wrote. “… Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government."

Right-wing figures roasted the Episcopal Church, with conservative political activist Charlie Kirk posting on X: "I guess you aren't a refugee if you are white. According to the Episcopal Church Jesus doesn't love white people."

Conservative commentator Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who settled a lawsuit with families of Sandy Hook victims after calling the mass shooting a “hoax”, wrote: "All Federal Funds MUST Be Pulled From The Episcopal Church. It's Time To Enforce The Separation Of Church And State."

Read the full Newsweek report here.

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an 12 24

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) reminded lawmakers that President-elect Donald Trump's first administration had negotiated with the Taliban for a withdrawal from Afghanistan at a hearing where Republicans attacked President Joe Biden over the decision to pull U.S. forces out of the country.

During Tuesday's House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Connolly displayed a photo of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with a Taliban negotiator.

"I'd like to put a picture up, which seems to suggest, Mr. Secretary, that the Republican narrative is correct about you," the Virginia Democrat told Secretary of State Antony Blinken. "Isn't that you with the Taliban negotiator, Mr. Secretary?"

"I'm not aware of having spent any time with a Taliban negotiator," Blinken replied.

"Oh, I'm sorry, that's Secretary Pompeo," Connolly said. "Was he your predecessor in the Biden administration as Secretary of State?"

"No, he was my predecessor in the previous administration, the Trump administration," Blinken explained.

Connolly pointed out that Trump had appointed Zalmay Khalilzad to negotiate directly with the Taliban in 2018.

"And he, of course, testified before this committee, and I can remember an exchange with him in which I expressed deep concern about the direction of the U.S. posture and the ramifications with allied Afghans who had worked for us or worked with us, and women," the lawmaker recalled. "And he kind of brushed them off at the time."

Khalilzad went on to forge an agreement with the Taliban in Doha that led to the U.S. withdrawal.

"All U.S. troops were to be out by May 31st," Blinken acknowledged. "In the meantime, 5,000 prisoners were released — Taliban prisoners."

"Among those 5,000 were terrorists, fighters, and people who returned to the battlefield against the Afghan government, which allegedly we were supporting at the time," Connolly remarked.

ALSO READ:Agenda 47: Alarm sounded about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term

"It's kind of hard to follow and it seems to me that we, by agreeing to that in the Trump years with Secretary Pompeo, your predecessor, and Ambassador Khalilzad, we actually set in motion an untenable but probably irrevocable kind of folding of events," he added.

"We cut a deal to get out and cut our losses at the expense of the Afghan government, the Afghan military, and ultimately the Afghan people, and that was all set in motion before you took the oath of office or President Biden took the oath of office."

Watch the video below from C-SPAN or click the link.

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arlington shove fito op ad

an 9 24

Even though he said he's willing to testify, House Republicans are still likely to vote in favor of holding one of President Joe Biden's Cabinet secretaries in contempt of Congress.

Politico reported Tuesday that Republicans are aiming to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt, claiming he is obstructing their duty to investigate the U.S. military's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) accused Blinken of failing to comply with a subpoena issued on September 18 to testify today, while Blinken is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

“I wish we were not here today. However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken brought this upon himself,” McCaul said. “I take no joy in this procedure.”

READ MORE:['Cease fire now!' Blinken testimony repeatedly interrupted by protesters against military aid to Israel

In a letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this week, Blinken emphasized that he was "willing to testify" but that his job as the United States' top diplomat required him to be at the United Nations. Blinken is expected to speak at the UNGA about the Biden administration's ongoing efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza and return hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, as well as about the United States' efforts to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia.

"I am profoundly disappointed you have once again chosen to send me a subpoena and threaten contempt, rather than engage with me and the department in a meaningful way to resolve this matter through the constitutionally-mandated accommodation process," Blinken wrote. "As I have made clear, I am willing to testify and have offered several reasonable alternatives to the dates unilaterally demanded by the Committee during which I am carrying out the President's important foreign policy objectives."

McCaul insisted that he made "numerous, good-faith" attempts to bring Blinken before the committee. However, Democrats disagreed with that characterization. Ranking member Gregory Meeks (D-New York) accused McCaul and other Republicans of orchestrating a "political stunt made for Fox News."

“That’s what this is: a political stunt, plain and simple,” Meeks told Politico. “Why is there suddenly a rush to hold this contempt vote when the secretary has made it clear time and time again that he’s willing to testify?”

As the U.S. was winding down the war in Afghanistan and preparing to withdraw all troops from the war-torn nation, Taliban fighters killed 13 American service members in a bombing at the Kabul airport. Republicans have seized on the tragedy as a central point to argue that Biden's oversight was to blame, given that he had assumed the oath of office several months before the attack.

However, as Vice President Kamala Harris pointed out during her September debate with former President Donald Trump, the Biden administration was simply carrying out the peace plan that Trump and his then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo negotiated with the Taliban in 2020. That deal established the timeline for U.S. withdrawal, with all parties agreeing that the U.S. would withdraw from Afghanistan by May of 2021 after roughly 20 years of war.

Blinken is the third of Biden's cabinet secretaries to be pursued by House Republicans. The House GOP impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this year over the Biden administration's immigration policy, and held Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over his refusal to provide the GOP with audio of Biden's deposition with Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur.

Click here to read Politico's report in full.

READ MORE:['That's false': Trump caught lying about Afghanistan withdrawal to families of slain veterans

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8 22

kabul not in charge, opaque decison 180 on HS girls

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trump arlington staff shoved worker 13 kia thumbs up

an 9 24

...Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have been railing against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over the United States' withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 13 military members killed during the attack at Abbey Gate.

But Democrats have countered that the Biden Administration inherited Trump's flawed withdrawal plan. And Democratic leaders aren't the only ones who are making that argument.

In a new letter, MeidasTouch Media's Ron Filipkowski reports, some prominent military leaders argue that Trump's withdrawal plan had major flaws.

In the letter, a group calling itself National Security Leaders for America — which includes Adm. Steve Abbott, Major Gen. Peter S. Cooke, and others — argues, "He repeatedly fails to take responsibility for his own role in putting service members in harm's way. Without involving the Afghan government, he and his Administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban that freed 5000 Taliban fighters and allowed them to return to the battlefield. Then, he left President Biden and Vice President Harris with no plans to execute a withdrawal, and with little time to do so."

The letter continues, "This chaotic approach severely hindered the Biden-Harris Administration's ability to execute the most orderly withdrawal possible and put our service members and our allies at risk. Nevertheless, President Biden with the support of Vice President Harris ended America's longest war, oversaw the largest airlift in U.S. history, and brought our troops home."

Filipkowski notes that the Afghanistan withdrawal isn't the only criticism that National Security Leaders for America have of Trump.

"The letter begins by emphasizing Harris' support for NATO, Ukraine and our allies while noting that Trump's own…. national security team has publicly stated that he is a danger to those alliances," Filipkowski explains. "It then goes on to note Trump's disparaging comments about wounded veterans and the Medal of Honor."

*Read MeidasTouch Media's full article at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/john-bolton-newsmax-host-afghanistan/

trump's deal

salon lucien truscott iii

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/afghanistan-exit/

tx lt gov patrick rants about doj garland fail?!

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https://www.mediamatters.org/war-afghanistan/ken-cuccinelli-says-afghan-refugees-are-being-brought-united-states-order-destroy

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rev door mil logistic bd, hallib charged govt for meals never provided; did initial study bush 41 that said pvt cheaper but real # 2x more $

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/study-says-nearly-half-of-defense-spending-for-9-11-wars-went-to-private-contractors

Sep 13, 2021 5:58 PM EDT

Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors,a study released Monday found. While much of this money went to weapons suppliers, the research is the latest to point to the dependence on contractors for war-zone duties as contributing to mission failures in Afghanistan in particular.

In the post-9/11 wars, U.S. corporations contracted by the Defense Department not only handled war-zone logistics like running fuel convoys and staffing chow lines but performed mission-crucial work like [dyncorp]training and equipping Afghan security forces — security forces that collapsed last month as the Taliban swept the country.

Within weeks, and before the U.S. military had even completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban easily routed an Afghan government and military that Americans had spent 20 years and billions of dollars to stand up. President Joe Biden placed blame squarely on the Afghans themselves. “We gave them every chance,” he said last month. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight.”

But William Hartung, the author of Monday’s study by Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Center for International Policy,and others say it’s essential that Americans examine what role the reliance on private contractors played in the post-9/11 wars. In Afghanistan, that included contractors allegedly paying protection money to warlords and the Taliban themselves, and the Defense Department insisting on equipping the Afghan air force with complex Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft that few but U.S. contractors knew how to maintain.

“If it were only the money, that would be outrageous enough,” Hartung, the director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, said of instances where the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors backfired. “But the fact it undermined the mission and put troops at risk is even more outrageous.”

At the start of this year, before Biden began the final American withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were far more contractors in Afghanistan and also in Iraq than U.S. troops.

The U.S. saw about 7,000 military members die in all post-9/11 conflicts, and nearly 8,000 contractors, another Costs of War study estimates.[total pvt out# mil 150k?]

The Professional Services Council, an organization representing businesses contracting with the government, cited a lower figure from the U.S. Department of Labor saying nearly 4,000 federal contractors have been killed since 2001.

A spokeswoman pointed to a statement last month from the organization’s president, David J. Berteau: “For almost two decades, government contractors have provided broad and essential support for U.S. and allied forces, for the Afghan military and other elements of the Afghan government, and for humanitarian and economic development assistance.”

U.S. officials after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks embraced private contractors as an essential part of the U.S. military response.

It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, [nope bush 41 hallib study to pvtize]the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says. Cheney and defense contractors argued that relying on private contractors for work that service members did in previous wars would allow for a trimmer U.S. military, and be more efficient and cost effective.

By 2010, Pentagon spending had surged by more than one-third, as the U.S. fought dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a post-9/11 American, politicians vied to show support for the military in a country grown far more security conscious.

“Any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November,” the study notes Harry Stonecipher, then the vice president of Boeing, telling The Wall Street Journal the month after the attacks.[up 3-5% /yr soon to hill trillion; reconciliation 3.5 trill over 10 years so this is 2x?!]

And up to a third of the Pentagon contracts went to just five weapons suppliers. Last fiscal year, for example, the money Lockheed Martin alone got from Pentagon contracts was one and a half times the entire budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the study.

The Pentagon pumped out more contracts than it could oversee, lawmakers and government special investigators said.

For example, a Florida Republican Party official made millions on what lawmakers charged were excess profits when the U.S. granted a one-of-a-kind contract for fuel convoys from Jordan to Iraq, the study notes. The electrocution of at least 18 service members by bad wiring in bases in Iraq, some of it blamed on major contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, was another of many instances where government investigations pointed to shoddy logistics and reconstruction work.

The stunning Taliban victory last month in Afghanistan is drawing attention now to even graver consequences: the extent to which the U.S. reliance on contractors may have heightened the difficulties of the Afghan security forces.

Jodi Vittori, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and scholar of corruption and fragile states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study, points to the U.S. insistence that the Afghan air force use U.S.-made helicopters. Afghans preferredRussian helicopters, which were easier to fly, could be maintained by Afghans, and were suited to rugged Afghanistan.

When U.S. contractors pulled out with U.S. troops this spring and summer, taking their knowledge of how to maintain U.S.-provided aircraft with them, top Afghan leaders bitterly complained to the U.S. that it had deprived them of one essential advantage over the Taliban.

Hartung, like others, also points to the corruption engendered by the billions of loosely monitored dollars that the U.S. poured into Afghanistan as one central reason that Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government lost popular support, and Afghan fighters lost morale.

Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state under President Barack Obama, accused defense contractors at risk in war zones of resorting to payoffs to armed groups, making protection money one of the biggest sources of funding for the Taliban.

The United States also relied, in part, on defense contractors to carry out one of the tasks most central to its hopes of success in Afghanistan — helping to set up and train an Afghan military and other security forces that could stand up to extremist groups and to insurgents, including the Taliban.

Tellingly, Vittori said, it was Afghan commandos who had consistent training by U.S. special operations forces and others who did most of the fighting against the Taliban last month.

Relying less on private contractors, and more on the U.S. military as in past wars, might have given the U.S. better chances of victory in Afghanistan, Vittori noted. She said that would have meant U.S. presidents accepting the political risks of sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and getting more body bags of U.S. troops back.

“Using contractors allowed America to fight a war that a lot of Americans forgot we were fighting,” Vittori said.

no lnx

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-14-2021/

trump released 5k taliban prisoners incl guy running cty?! 9/13/21 now denies it] pompeo blames biden

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/pompeo-taliban-2654804395/

rnc pulls pages on boast about afgan deal?

top Taliban leaders are among the 5000 that Trump released last year over everyone's objections [when screwed kurds?]

SemDem Daily Kos

August 16, 2021

One year ago, the Donald released 5000 Taliban fighters in exchange for a cease-fire to help his flailing presidential campaign, despite strenuous objections from both the Pentagon and the Afghan government...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/afghanistan-war/

tom d

on n May 1st, the date Donald Trump signed onto for the withdrawal of the remaining 3,500 American troops from Afghanistan, the war there, already 19 years old, was still officially a teenager. Think of September 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the date Joe Biden has chosen for the same — as, in essence, the very moment when its teenage years will be over.

In all that time, Washington has been fighting what, in reality, should have been considered a fantasy war, a mission impossible in that country, however grim and bloody, based on fantasy expectations and fantasy calculations, few of which seem to have been stanched in Washington even so many years later. Not surprisingly, Biden's decision evoked the predictable reactions in that city. The military high command's never-ending urge to stick with a failed war was complemented by the inside-the-Beltway Blob's doomsday scenarios and tired nostrums.

The latter began the day before the president even went public when, in a major opinion piece, the Washington Post's editorial board distilled the predictable platitudes to come: such a full-scale military exit, they claimed, would deprive Washington of all diplomatic influence and convince the Taliban that it could jettison its talks with President Ashraf Ghani's demoralized U.S.-backed government and fight its way to power. A Taliban triumph would, in turn, eviscerate democracy and civil society, leaving rights gained by women and minorities in these years in the dust, and so destroy everything the U.S. had fought for since October 2001.

By this September, of course, 775,000-plus Americans soldiers will have served in Afghanistan (a few of them the children of those who had served early in the war). More than a fifth of them would endure at least three tours of duty there! Suffice it to say that most of the armchair generals who tend to adorn establishment think tanks haven't faced such hardships.

In 2010 and 2011, the Obama surge would deploy as many as 100,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The Pentagon states that, as of this month, 2,312 American soldiers have died there (80% killed in action) and 20,666 have been injured. Then there's the toll taken on vets of that never-ending war thanks to PTSD, suicide, and substance abuse. Military families apart, however, much of the American public has been remarkably untouched by the war, since there's no longer a draft and Uncle Sam borrowed money, rather than raising taxes, to foot the $2.26 trillion bill. As a result, the forever war dragged on, consuming blood and treasure without any Vietnam War-style protests.

Not surprisingly, most Americans know even less about the numbers of Afghan civilians killed and wounded in these years. Since 2002, at least 47,000 non-combatants have been killed and another 43,000 injured, whether by airstrikes, artillery fire, shootings, improvised explosive devices, or suicide and car bombings. A 2020 U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan notes that 2019 was the sixth straight year in which 10,000 civilians were killed or wounded. And this carnage has occurred in one of the world's poorest countries, which ranks 187th in per-capita income, where the death or incapacitation of an adult male (normally the primary breadwinner in a rural Afghan home) can tip already-poor families into destitution.

So how, then, can the calls to persevere make sense? Seek and you won't find a persuasive answer. Consider the most notable recent attempt to provide one, the Afghanistan Study Group report, written by an ensemble of ex-officials, retired generals, and think-tank luminaries, not a few of them tied to big weapons-producing companies. Released with significant fanfare in February, it offered no substantive proposals for attaining goals that have been sought for 19 years, including a stable democracy with fair elections, a free press, an unfettered civil society, and equal rights for all Afghans — all premised on a political settlement between the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban.

Still Standing After All These Years

Now, consider Afghanistan's bedrock reality: the Taliban, which has battled the world's most fearsome military machine for two decades, remains standing, and continues to expand its control in rural areas. The U.S., its NATO allies, and the Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces have indeed killed some 50,000 Taliban fighters over the years, including, in 2016, its foremost leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor. In 2019-2020 alone, several senior commanders, also members of the Taliban's shadow government, were killed, including the "governors" of Badakshan, Farah, Logar, Samangan, and Wardak provinces. Yet the Taliban, whose roots lie among the Pashtun, the country's historically dominant ethnic group, have managed to replenish their ranks, procure new weapons and ammunition, and raise money, above all through taxes on opium poppy farming.

It helps that the Taliban continues to get covert support from Pakistan's military and intelligence service, which played a pivotal role in creating the movement in the early 1990s after it was clear that the leaders of the Pakistan-backed Pashtun mujahedeen (literally, those who wage jihad) proved unable to shoot their way into power because minority nationalities (mainly Uzbeks and Tajiks) resisted ferociously. Yet the Taliban has indigenous roots, too, and its success can't be attributed solely to intimidation and violence. Its political agenda and puritanical version of Islam appeal to many Afghans. Absent that, it would have perished long ago.

Instead, according to the Long War Journal, the Taliban now controls 75 of Afghanistan's 400 districts; the government rules 133 others, with the remaining 187 up for grabs. Although the insurgency isn't on the homestretch to victory, it's never been in a stronger military position since the 2001 American invasion. Nor has the morale of its fighters dissipated, though many are doubtless weary of war. According to a May U.N. report, "the Taliban remain confident they can take power by force," even though their fighters have long been vastly outmatched in numbers, mobility, supplies, transportation, and the caliber of their armaments. Nor do they have the jets, helicopters, and bombers their adversaries, especially the United States do, and use with devastating effect. In 2019, 7,423 bombs and other kinds of ordnance were dropped on Afghanistan, eight times as many as in 2015.

Tallying Costs

As 2019 ended, a group of former senior U.S. officials claimed that the Afghan campaign's costs have been overblown. American troops killed there the previous year, they pointed out, amounted to only a fifth of those who died during "non-combat training exercises" and that "U.S. direct military expenditures in Afghanistan are approximately three percent of annual U.S. military spending" and were decreasing. It evidently escaped them that even a few fatalities that occur because a country's leaders pursue outlandish objectives like reshaping an entire society in a distant land should matter.

As for the monetary costs, it depends on what you count. Those "direct military expenditures" aren't the only ones incurred year after year from the Afghan War. Brown University's Costs of War Project, for instance, also includes expenses from the Pentagon's "base budget" (the workaday costs of maintaining the armed forces); funds allotted for "Overseas Contingency Operations," the post-9/11 counter-terrorism wars; interest payments on money borrowed to fund the war; the long-term pensions and benefits of its veterans; and economic aid provided to Afghanistan by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Do the math that way and the price tag turns out to be so much larger.

But even if you were to accept that 3% figure, that would still total $22 billion from the $738 billion fiscal year 2020 Pentagon budget, hardly chump change — especially given the resources needed to address festering problems on the home front, including a pandemic, child poverty, hunger, homelessness, and an opioid epidemic.

Nation-Building: Form vs. Substance

Now, consider some examples of the "progress" highlighted by the proponents of pressing on. These would include democratic elections and institutions, less corruption, and inroads against the narcotics trade.

First, the election system, an effective one being, of course, a prerequisite for democracy. Of course, given the way Donald Trump and crew dealt with election 2020 here in the U.S., Americans should think twice before blithely casting stones at the Afghan electoral system. In addition, organizing elections in a war-ravaged country is a dangerous task when an insurgency is working overtime to violently disrupt them.

Still, each of Afghanistan's four presidential elections (2004, 2009, 2014, 2019) produced widespread, systematic fraud verified by investigative reporters and noted in U.S. government reports. After the 2014 presidential poll, for instance, candidate Abdullah Abdullah wouldn't concede and threatened to form a parallel government, insisting that his opponent, Ashraf Ghani, had won fraudulently. To avert bloodshed, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry brokered a power-sharing deal that made Abdullah the "chief executive" — a position unmentioned in the Afghan constitution. (Incidentally, elections to the national legislature have also been plagued by irregularities.) Although USAID has worked feverishly to improve election procedures and turnout, spending $200 million on the 2014 presidential election alone, voting fraud remained pervasive in 2019.

As for key political institutions, which also bear American fingerprints, the respected Afghanistan Analyst Network only recently examined the state of the supreme court, the senate, provincial and district assemblies, and the Independent Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution (ICOIC). It concluded that they "lacked even the minimum independence needed to exercise their constitutional mandate to provide accountability" and aggravated the "stagnation of the overall political system."

The senate lacked the third of its membership elected by district assemblies — the remaining senators are appointed by the president or elected by provincial assemblies — for a simple reason. Though constitutionally mandated, district assembly elections have never been held. As for the ICOIC, it had only four out of its seven legally required commissioners, insufficient for a quorum.

When it comes to the narcotics trade, Afghanistan now accounts for 90% of the world's illicit opium, essential for the making of heroin. The hectares of land devoted to opium-poppy planting have increased dramatically from 8,000 in 2001 to 263,000 by 2018. (A slump in world demand led to a rare drop in 2019.) Little wonder, since poppies provide destitute Afghan farmers with income to cover their basic needs. A U.N. study estimates that poppy sales, at $2 billion in 2019, exceeded the country's legal exports, while the opium economy accounted for 7% to 11% of the gross domestic product.

Although the U.S. has spent at least $9 billion attempting to stamp out Afghanistan's narcotics trade, a 2021 report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) concluded that the investment had next to no effect and that Afghan dominance of the global opium business remained unrivalled. The report didn't, however, mention the emergence of a new, more insidious problem. In recent years, that country has become a major producer of illegal synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, both cheaper and more profitable than opium cultivation. It now houses, according to a European Union study, an estimated 500 meth labs that manufacture 65.5 tons of the stuff daily.

As for the campaign against corruption, a supposed pillar of U.S. nation-building, forget it. From shakedowns by officials and warlords to palatial homes built with ill-gotten gains by the well-connected, corruption permeates the American-installed system in Afghanistan.

Though U.S. officials have regularly fumed about the corruption of senior Afghan officials, including the first post-Taliban president, Hamid Karzai, the CIA funneled "tens of millions" of dollars to him for years (as he himself confirmed). Investigative reporting by the Washington Post's Craig Whitlock revealed that many notorious warlords and senior officials were also blessed by the Agency's beneficence. They included Uzbek strongman and one-time First Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum, accused of murder, abduction, and rape, and Mohammed Zia Salehi, the head of administration at the National Security Council under President Karzai.

In 2015, a U.S. government investigation revealed that $300 million earmarked to pay the Afghan police never actually reached them and was instead "paid" to "ghost" (non-existent) officers or simply stolen by police officials. A 2012 study traced 3,000 Pentagon contracts totaling $106 billion and concluded that 40% of that sum had ended up in the pockets of crime bosses, government officials, and even insurgents.

According to SIGAR's first 2021 quarterly report to Congress, one U.S. contractor pled guilty to stealing $775,000 in State Department funds. Two others, subcontractors to weapons giant Lockheed Martin, submitted nearly $1.8 million in fraudulent invoices, while hiring local employees who lacked contractually required qualifications. (They were asked to procure counterfeit college diplomas from an Internet degree mill.)

And lest you think that this deeply embedded culture of corruption in Afghanistan is a "Third World" phenomenon, consider an American official's recollection that "the biggest source of corruption" in that country "was the United States."

Hubris and Nemesis Strike — Yet Again

While writing this piece, a memory came back to me. In 1988, I was part of a group that visited Afghanistan just as Soviet troops were starting to withdraw from that country. After a disastrous 10-year war, those demoralized young soldiers were headed for a homeland that itself would soon implode. The Red Army had been sent to Afghanistan in December 1979 by a geriatric Politburo leadership confident that it would save an embattled Afghan socialist regime, which had seized power in April 1978 and soon sparked a countrywide Islamist insurgency backed by the CIA and Saudi dollars that spawned a small group that called itself al-Qaeda, headed by a rich young Saudi.

Once the guerillas were crushed, so Soviet leaders then imagined, the building of a modern socialist society would proceed amid stability and a shiny new Soviet-allied Afghanistan would emerge. As for those ragtag bands of primitive Islamic warriors, what chance did they stand against well-trained Russian soldiers bearing the latest in modern firepower?

Moscow may even have believed that the Kabul government would hold its own after the Soviet military left what its new young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had then taken to calling "the bleeding wound." The Afghan president of that moment certainly did. When our group met him, Mohammed Najibullah Ahmadzai, a burly, fearsome fellow who had previously headed the KHAD, the country's brutal intelligence agency, confidently assured us that his government had strong support and plenty of staying power. Barely four years later, he would be castrated, dragged behind a vehicle, and strung up in public.

The Politburo's experiment in social re-engineering in a foreign country — no one said "nation-building" back then — led to more than 13,000 dead Soviet soldiers and perhaps as many as one million dead Afghans. No two wars are alike, of course, but the same vainglory that possessed those Soviet leaders marked the American campaign in Afghanistan in its early years. The white-hot anger that followed the 9/11 attacks and the public's desire for vengeance led the George W. Bush administration to topple the Taliban government. He and his successors in the White House, seized by the overweening pride theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had long ago warned his fellow Americans about, also believed that they would build a democratic and modern Afghanistan.

As it happened, they simply started another, even longer cycle of war in that unfortunate country, one guaranteed to rage on and consume yet more lives after American soldiers depart this September — assuming Biden's decision isn't thwarted.

FollowTomDispatch onTwitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

**Rajan Menon**, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

920 an

omg

Full frontal attack on rule of law’: Trump sanctions top ICC officials probing US war crimes in Afghanistan

us mil in afgan, but also israeli palestine

prospect of peace in Afghanistan is real — and Pakistan is the key playeran 320 the conv? not vetted

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/afghan-womens-rights-trailblazer-survives-gun/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-taliban-deal-falls-apart-and-republicans-are-taking-notice/

see also DN 3/9/20 fighting threatens peace deal w/ taliban

'afghanistan Papers’ reveal how presidents and generals misled the American public on war’s progress

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now March 9, 2020 foia

Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock has just won a George Polk Award for Military Reporting for his in-depth investigation called “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/afghanistan-papers-reveal-how-presidents-and-generals-misled-the-american-public-on-wars-progress/

An admission of colossal failure’: US dropped record number of bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/calls-intensify-for-hearings-on-us-officials-who-lied-to-american-people-about-endless-afghan-war-lets-bring-rumsfeld-in

no lnx

Calls intensify for hearings on US officials who lied to American people about endless Afghan War: ‘Let’s bring Rumsfeld in’

Written by Andrea Germanos / Common Dreams December 12, 2019

Rep. Ro Khanna on Wednesday said that The Washington Post‘s explosive investigation the “Afghanistan Papers” showed the need for a congressional hearing and that former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld should be among the current and former top officials called in for a reckoning before the American public.

Khanna (D-Calif.) made the comments at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Hebegan addressing Secretary of Defense Mark Esper by summing up the Post‘s report from Monday.

“The bottom line is that top military officials and civilian officials have known that the Afghan war has been has been unwinnable and have been misleading the American public for 20 years,” Khanna said. “Your predecessor Secretary Rumsfeld was quoted there as saying, ‘I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.'”

“Are you embarrassed by Secretary Rumsfeld comment and the other people quoted, and do you believe they owe the American public an explanation and an apology?” Khanna asked Esper.

Esper said it was up to the committee on whether or not to call a hearing. “But I do know this much. The story spanned multiple administrations, multiple uniformed and civilian officials, and I think it’s good to look back.”

Yet, Esper said, “I think at this point where I’m looking is forward. And forward tells me… the path to success, the win, is a political agreement between the parties on the ground.”

“But don’t you think we have to have some accountability so we don’t make the same mistake again?” asked Khanna. “Would you support this committee holding hearings on the Afghan Papers and calling in front of Congress every official who has misled the American public about whether this war was winnable in all or not? With 2,400 American soldiers dead, 775,000 Americans deployed, dont you think people owe this country an explanation?”

Khanna then said to committee chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), “I would request that this committee hold hearing on the Afghan Papers and call before Congress with subpoena every person who has misled this country.”

“And just like in the Pentagon Papers,” Khanna continued, “I think that should be one of our highest priorities… examining what has come out in that bombshell report.”

Smith responded by saying he believes “it’s appropriate to have hearing,” but said that calling “every single witness… would not be a productive of this committee’s time.”

Khanna shared a portion of the exchange on Twitter, adding, “Let’s bring Rumsfeld in.”

Senior military & civil officials knew the Afghanistan war was not winnable, but misled Americans. Today, @RepAdamSmith agreed with my call to hold hearings on the bombshell Afghan papers.

Let’s bring Rumsfeld in. pic.twitter.com/KSouR4GBHY

— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) December 11, 2019

The California Democrat’s remarks at the hearing echo comments he made earlier to The Hill.

“Subpoena all of the people who were mentioned and have them account and explain to the American people in some cases why they lied and in other cases why they were utterly incompetent,” Khanna told the outlet Wednesday.

The Post investigation had already motivated Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee, to call for a public hearing “to address these deeply concerning revelations about the Afghan war.”

In a letter sent Monday to Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Gillibrand wrote, “it is deeply troubling to read a report of interviews with U.S. government officials that appear to contradict the many assurances we have heard at committee hearings that the continuing war in Afghanistan has a coherent strategy and an end in sight.”

Why the Afghanistan papers shows we never learned Noam Chomsky’s lesson from Vietnam Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Inst

no lnx

New documents reveal officials have lied about Afghanistan for years — and failed to admit the war was unwinnable

Written by Travis Gettys / Raw Story December 9, 2019

A newly revealed batch of government documents reveals senior U.S. officials lied about the war in Afghanistan for years.

The documents, obtained by the Washington Post and generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the war, shows top officials failed to tell the truth about the longest armed conflict in American history and hid unmistakable evidence the war could not be won.

The government tried to shield the identities of most of the officials interviewed for the project and hide nearly everything they said, but the newspaper won the release of the documents under theFreedom of Information Act following a three-year legal battle.

The documents contain remarks from interviews with more than 400 officials who spoke bluntly about failures made during the 18-year war.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who oversaw the war during the Bush and Obama administrations. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

More than 775,000 U.S. troops have fought in Afghanistan since 2001, and 2,300 have died there and 20,589 were wounded in action.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/new-documents-reveal-officials-have-lied-about-afghanistan-for-years-and-failed-to-admit-the-war-was-unwinnable/

rummy?

New documents reveal officials have lied about Afghanistan for years — and failed to admit the war was unwinnable

A newly revealed batch of government documents reveals senior U.S.…

an 1219

America’s Afghanistan anti-drug boondoggle nears the $9 Billion mark Phillip Smith / Independent Media inst

bolton fired as scapegoat or roadblock?

Trump Calls Off Secret Afghanistan Meeting, Putting Fate of Possible Peace Deal in Question

Afghanistan has been the world's leading illicit opium producer since 2001.^[1] Afghanistan's opium poppy harvest produces more than 90% of illicit heroin globally, and more than 95% of the European supply.^[2][3] More land is used for opium in Afghanistan than is used for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the non-pharmaceutical-grade opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan.^[4] This amounts to an export value of about US$4 billion, with a quarter being earned by opium farmers and the rest going to district officials, insurgents, warlords, and drug traffickers.^[5] In the seven years (1994–2000) prior to a Taliban opium ban, the Afghan farmers' share of gross income from opium was divided among 200,000 families.^[6] As of 2017, opium production provides about 400,000 jobs in Afghanistan, more than the Afghan National Security Forces.^[7] In addition to opium, Afghanistan is also the world's leading producer of hashish.^[8][9].

History

Iran after poppy cultivation was banned there. Afghanistan and Pakistan increased production and became major suppliers of opiates to Western Europe and North America in the mid-1970s, when political instability combined with a prolonged drought disrupted supplies from the Golden Triangle.^[10]

Soviet period (1979–1989):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

After a Soviet-backed left-wing government in Afghanistan failed to gain popular support, the Russians decided to invade. A number of resistance leaders concentrated on increasing opium production in their regions to finance their operations, regardless of its haram Islamic status, in particular Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, and Ismat Muslim. The production was doubled to 575 metric tons between 1982 and 1983.^[11][12] (At this time the United States was pursuing an "arms-length" supporting strategy of the Afghan freedom-fighters or Mujahideen, the main purpose of which was to cripple the Soviet Union slowly into withdrawal through attrition rather than effect a quick and decisive overthrow). Hekmatyar, the leading recipient of aid from the CIA and Pakistan, developed at least six heroin refineries in Koh-i-Sultan in southwestern Pakistan, while other warlords were content to sell raw opium. Nasim Akhundzada, who controlled the traditional poppy growing region of northern Helmand, issued quotas for opium production, which he was even rumoured to enforce with torture and extreme violence. To maximise control of trafficking, Nasim maintained an office in Zahidan, Iran.^[13]

As explained by Zbigniew Brzezinski:

The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'^[14]

It was alleged by the Soviets on multiple occasions that US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents were helping smuggle opium out of Afghanistan, either into the West, in order to raise money for the Afghan resistance, or into the Soviet Union, in order to weaken it through drug addiction. According to Alfred McCoy, the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar^[15] and others such as Haji Ayub Afridi.

Another factor was the eradication effort inside Pakistan (whose Inter-Services Intelligence were coincidentally supporters of the Mujahideen). The Pakistani government, US Agency for International Development(USAID) and other groups were involved in attempting to eliminate poppy cultivation from certain areas of the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) bordering Afghanistan. The opium industry shifted from Pakistan into Afghanistan during the 1980s.^[16][17]

Warlord period (1989–1994)

When the Soviet Army was forced to withdraw in 1989, a power vacuum was created. Various Mujahideen factions started fighting against each other for power. With the discontinuation of Western support, they resorted ever more to poppy cultivation to finance their military existence.

Rise of the Taliban (1994–2001):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

During the Taliban rule, Afghanistan saw a bumper opium crop of 4,500 metric tons(4,400 long tons; 5,000 short tons) in 1999.^[18]

In July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, collaborating with the UN to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan, declared that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world's most successful anti-drug campaigns. The Taliban enforced a ban on poppy farming via threats, forced eradication, and public punishment of transgressors. The result was a99% reduction in the area of opium poppy farming in Taliban-controlled areas, roughly three quarters of the world's supply of heroin at the time.^[19] The ban was effective only briefly due to the deposition of the Taliban in 2002.

However, some people (Martin, An Intimate War, 2014), suggest that certain parties benefited from the price increase during the ban. Some^[who?], even believe it was a form of market manipulation on the part of certain drug lords. Dried opium, unlike most agricultural products, can easily be stored for long periods without refrigeration or other expensive equipment. With huge stashes of opium stored in secret hideaways, the Taliban and other groups that were involved in the drug trade were in theory able to make huge personal profits during the price spikes after the 2000 ban and the chaos following the September 11 attacks.^{[20][21][22][23]}

Afghan War (2001–current)

Afghan War, the collapse of the economy and the scarcity of other sources of revenue forced many of the country's farmers to resort to growing opium for export (1,300 km² or 500 sq mi in 2004 according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime).

In December 2001, a number of prominent Afghans met in Bonn, Germany, under UN auspices to develop a plan to reestablish the State of Afghanistan, including provisions for a new constitution and national elections. As part of that agreement, the United Kingdom (UK) was designated the lead country in addressing counter-narcotics issues in Afghanistan. Afghanistan subsequently implemented its new constitution and held national elections. On December 7, 2004, Hamid Karzai was formally sworn in as president of a democratic Afghanistan."^[24]

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Afghanistan_map_-security_by_district_and_opium_poppy_cultivation_by_province_2007_-2008.png)

Regional security risks and levels of opium poppy cultivation in 2007–2008.

Two of the following three growing seasons saw record levels of opium poppy cultivation. Corrupt officials may have undermined the government's enforcement efforts. Afghan farmers claimed that "government officials take bribes for turning a blind eye to the drug trade while punishing poor opium growers."^[25]

Another obstacle to getting rid of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is the reluctant collaboration between US forces and Afghan warlords in hunting drug traffickers. In the absence of the Taliban, the warlords largely control the opium trade but are also highly useful to US forces in scouting, providing local intelligence, keeping their own territories clean from Al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents, and even taking part in military operations.

While US and allied efforts to combat the drug trade have been stepped up, the effort is hampered by the fact that many suspected drug traffickers are now top officials in the Karzai government.^[26] Estimates made in 2006 by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimate that 52% of the nation's GDP, amounting to US$2.7 billion annually, is generated by the drug trade.^[27] The rise in production has been linked to the deteriorating security situation, as production is markedly lower in areas with stable security.^[28] By some, the extermination of the poppy crops is not seen as a viable option because the sale of poppies constitutes the livelihood of Afghanistan's rural farmers. Some 3.3 million Afghans are involved in producing opium.^[29] Opium is more profitable than wheat and destroying opium fields could possibly lead to discontent or unrest among the indigent population.^[30] Some poppy eradication programs have, however, proven effective, especially in the north of Afghanistan. The opium poppy eradication program of Balkh Governor Ustad Atta Mohammad Noor between 2005 and 2007 successfully reduced poppy cultivation in Balkh Province from 7,200 hectares (18,000 acres) in 2005 to zero by 2007.^[31]

The Afghanistan Opium Risk Assessment 2013, issued by UNODC, suggests that the Taliban has, since 2008, been supporting farmers growing poppy, as a source of income for the insurgency.^[32]

Former US State Department Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Thomas Schweich, in a New York Times article dated July 27, 2007, asserts that opium production is protected by the government of Hamid Karzai as well as by the Taliban, as all parties to political conflict in Afghanistan, as well as criminals, benefit from opium production, and, in Schweich's opinion, the US military turns a blind eye to opium production as not being central to its anti-terrorism mission.^[33][34] In March 2010, NATO rejected Russian proposals for Afghan poppy spraying, citing concerns over income of Afghan people.^[35] There have also been allegations of US and European involvement in Afghanistan's drug trafficking with links to Taliban.^[36]

On October 28, 2010, agents of Russia's Federal Service for the Control of Narcotics joined Afghan and US anti-drug forces in an operation to destroy a major drug production site near Jalalabad. In the operation, 932 kg (2,055 lb) of high quality heroin and 156 kg (344 lb) of opium, with a street value of US$250 million, and a large amount of technical equipment was destroyed. This was the first anti-drug operation to include Russian agents. According to Viktor Ivanov, Director of Russia's Federal Service for the Control of Narcotics, this marks an advance in relations between Moscow and Washington. Hamid Karzai called the operation a violation of Afghan sovereignty and international law.^[37][38]

As had been the case in Indochina during the Vietnam War,^[39] the US invasion has in fact been causal in a massive increase in opium production, the aforementioned eradication efforts being largely window dressing. A SIGAR report showed a threefold increase in area under cultivation between 2002 and 2014.^[40] A December 2014 UNAIDS study^[41] showed an increase of 7% in one year alone.

The facts of an apparently non-significant resultant change to opium production is corroborated in a report by BBC, dated to 20 July 2015:^[42]

Nine years of intense fighting by international troops did nothing to stop the production. In fact it only became worse. The only difference was that it has been pushed out beyond the central populated zone to less governed badlands beyond the Helmand canal.

Foreign involvement:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Approximately 40,000 foreign troops attempted to manage "security" in Afghanistan, principally of 32,000 regular soldiers from 37 NATO forces: the International Security Assistance Force. 8,000 US and other special operations forces, mainly privately contracted soldiers of fortune,^[40] make up the balance. There is significant resistance, both from the ideological and theocratic Taliban, especially in southern Afghanistan, and independent local warlords and drug organizations. Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of UNODC, described the situation: "There is no rule of law in most of the southern parts of Afghanistan—the bullets rule."

Production and distribution:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Drug trafficking:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The following areas of Afghanistan play a role in the drug trafficking:

Production
- "Southern region" of Helmand and Kandahar provinces, on the border with Pakistan, which are the highest-volume areas for drug transactions. There is a traditional route from Helmand, through Pakistan, to Iran
Smuggling
- Herat, in Herat Province, the Northern Alliance stronghold, which borders Iran
- Faizabad, in Badakhshan province, which has borders with Tajikistan, Pakistan, and China.

Labor practices:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

According to the US Department of Labor's 2014 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, opium production is one of the sectors that rely on child labor in Afghanistan.^[43] Poppies being the source of the crude drug, children are still recruited to harvest these flowers in the country's farming fields.^[44]

Worldwide impact

According to European Union (EU) agencies, Afghanistan has been Europe's main heroin supplier for more than 10 years.^[45] Heroin enters Europe primarily by two major land routes: the long-standing 'Balkan route' through Turkey; and, since the mid-1990s, the 'northern route', which leaves northern Afghanistan through Central Asia and on to Russia (and is sometimes colloquially referred to as the 'silk route'). There is an estimated 1.5 million (1.3–1.7 million) opioid users in the EU, with an average prevalence of 4 to 5 per 1,000.^[45] In 2005, there were around 7,000 acute drug deaths, with opioids being present in the blood of 70% of the deceased.^[45] There was a minimum of 49,000 seizures resulting in the interception of an estimated 19.4 metric tons (19.1 long tons; 21.4 short tons) of heroin. Countries reporting the largest number of seizures (in descending order): UK (2005), Spain, Germany, Greece, and France. Countries reporting the largest quantities of heroin seized in 2005 (in descending order): Turkey, UK, Italy, France, the Netherlands.^[45]

Presently with the resurgence of high output production of opium and heroin in post-Taliban Afghanistan, there is an ongoing heroin addiction epidemic in Russia which is claiming 30,000 lives each year, mostly among young people. There were two and half million heroin addicts in Russia by 2009.^[46]

Medical production:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) has proposed legalizing opium production for medical purposes.^[citation ^needed] Opium can be manufactured into codeine and morphine, which are both legal pain-killers. The Governor of Afghanistan's Helmand Province, Hayatullah Hayat is a proponent of eventually legalizing opium production to create morphine.^[47]

...

Opium production in Afghanistan - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan

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:{Afghanistan has been the world's leading illicit opium producer since 2001. Afghanistan's .... The Taliban enforced a ban on poppy farming via threats, forced eradication, and public punishment of transgressors. .... The International Narcotics Control Board which regulates opium supply throughout the world enforces the ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Last year's record opium production in Afghanistan threatens ...

https://www.unodc.org/.../last-years-record-opium-production-in-afghanistan-threaten...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{May 21, 2018 - In 2017, opium cultivation in Afghanistan reached a record high with an ... In addition to farming households, opium provides access to daily wage ... international approach that targets the supply chain of opiates along all its ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

AN 11/18

n the final days of the midterm campaign President Donald Trump's camo clown car has all eyes on the southern border as 15,000 American troops are assembled to prepare for the onslaught of a ragtag caravan of refugees.He’s been visualizing a kind of Gaza-like scenario where American troops will get to fire on rock throwing migrants.

We look where he points no matter what. We can’t help it. He’s the ‘entertainer-in-chief’. His skilled misdirection has the effect of obscuring his disastrous misrule. You have to always ask what are the things he’s not attending to, or leaving on automatic pilot, that could come crashing down on his watch or somebody else’s later on down the line.

So, we should not be surprised that there was scant attention paid last week when the U.S. Treasury Department disclosed that it was going to issue $425 billion in new debt for this quarter, bringing our grand total for 2018 to an eye popping $1.3 trillion in debt. As the Fiscal Times pointed out, that reflects “a 145 percent increase from the $546 billion issued in 2017.” That’s the biggest annual issuance of federal public debt since 2010 when Uncle Sam issued $1.586 trillion in debt.

Back then the Obama Administration at least had the rationale that they were grappling with a real crisis brought on by the Great Recession and close to nine million Americans losing their jobs. Does Trump’s presidency, in and of itself, meet the “crisis” standard? Perhaps.

Of course, this latest explosion in debt is linked to the GOP’s $1.5 trillion tax cut, skewed for the corporations and individuals that have already been doing so well, as the levels of wealth concentration and inequality hit historic highs. Working at the behest of their wealthy friends, Trump and the GOP reduced the amount of tax revenue coming into the government and gifted that flow to their already wealthy donors, leaving future generations to deal with the mountain of public debt left behind.

By 2028, the Congressional Budget Officepredicts the amount of the government’s debt will be equal to the size of the U.S. economy, swelling to 96 percent of the GDP, blowing past the post-World War II record set in 1946, when it was equal to 104 percent of the GDP.

Similarly, back in September there were no reporters present when President Trump signed a $854 billion-dollar spending bill that included an obscene $674 billion defense budget.

The Pentagon budget included Lockheed Martin Corporation’s troubled F-35 which Popular Mechanics described as a “trillion-dollar” albatross. “For over two decades, the F-35 has been the symbol of everything that's wrong with mammoth defense contracts: behind schedule, over budget, and initially, over-sold,” reported the magazine.

“In development for nearly 17 years and seven years behind schedule, total acquisition costs now exceed $406 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion,” according to a report from Citizens Against Government Waste, a non-profit government accountability group. “An April 2015 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that the lifetime operation and maintenance costs of the most expensive weapon system in history will total approximately $1 trillion.”

And also under reported was that just a few weeks after the President doubled down on funding the F-35, the U.S. military grounded all the F-35s on the planet, after one crashed near Beaufort, S.C. The aviation press reported "suspect fuel tubes.”

A week after that in Afghanistan, where there are people still shooting at American troops, U.S. Army General Austin Scott Miller, the 17th commander to lead U.S. forces in Afghanistan, barely escaped an attack that left Kandahar’s police and intelligence chiefs dead. The deadly attack came in the run-up to parliamentary elections that were marred by violence.

The spectacular attack underscored the reality that conditions on the ground continue to deteriorate. As the Special Inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported last month “the Afghan government control or influence of its districts reached the lowest level (55.5%) since SIGAR began tracking district control in November 2015.”

Over those four years “Afghan government control and influence over its districts has declined by about 16 percentage points; contested districts have increased by about 11 points; and insurgent control or influence has risen by 5.5 points,” according to the latest SIGAR report to Congress.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan reported649 civilian casualties (313 deaths and 336 injuries) “due to aerial operations by pro-government forces from January 1 to September 30, 2018, a 39% increase in from the same period in 2017 and a record number of civilian casualties caused by air strikes since UNAMA began recording civilian-casualty data in 2009.”

SIGAR reports that Afghanistan’s Attorney General continues to resist cooperation with U.S. anti-corruption efforts “by pursuing a number of low-level, rather than high-level, corruption cases.”

And as the Afghan government’s control on the ground continues to slip, its defense force is struggling to maintain troop strength now hitting its “lowest level recorded in the third quarter of the year since 2012…. decreased by 1,914 personnel since last quarter and by 8,827 personnel since the same period last year.” That leaves the ANDSF roughly 40,000 soldiers short of their 352,000 troop target.

But have no fear, POTUS has us covered with a surge bearing down on Mexico.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/forever-war-heres-dark-truth-unending-conflict-afghanistan-reveals-about-united

Tom E:

Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I’m going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America’s second Afghan War, no less)? I began writing about that war in October 2001, almost 17 years ago, just after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. That was how I inadvertently launched the unnamed listserv that would, a year later, become TomDispatch. Given the website’s continuing focus on America’s forever wars (a phrase I first used in 2010), what choice have I had but to write about Afghanistan ever since?

So think of this as the war piece to end all war pieces. And let the repetition begin!

Here, for instance, is what I wrote about our Afghan War in 2008, almost seven years after it began, when the U.S. Air Force took out a bridal party, including the bride herself and at least 26 other women and children en route to an Afghan wedding. And that would be just one of eight U.S. wedding strikes I toted up by the end of 2013 in three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, that killed almost 300 potential revelers. “We have become a nation of wedding crashers," I wrote, "the uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home.”

Here’s what I wrote about Afghanistan in 2009, while considering the metrics of “a war gone to hell”: “While Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we've been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2010, thinking about how “forever war” had entered the bloodstream of the twenty-first-century U.S. military (in a passage in which you’ll notice a name that became more familiar in the Trump era): “And let’s not leave out the Army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently published report, ‘Operating Concept, 2016-2028,’ overseen by Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a senior adviser to Gen. David Petraeus. It opts to ditch ‘Buck Rogers’ visions of futuristic war, and instead to imagine counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as ‘wars of exhaustion,’ in one, two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2012, when Afghanistan had superseded Vietnam as the longest war in American history: “Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust. In fact, if you hadn’t noticed -- and weirdly enough no one has -- that former war finally seems to have all but vanished.”

Here’s what I wrote in 2015,thinking about the American taxpayer dollars that had, in the preceding years, gone into Afghan “roads to nowhere, ghost soldiers, and a $43 million gas station” built in the middle of nowhere, rather than into this country: “Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109 billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War II) and still the country was a shambles.”

And here’s what I wrote last year thinking about the nature of our never-ending war there: “Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians, who exactly will ride to our rescue? Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.”

And that’s just to dip a toe into my writings on America’s all-time most never-ending war.

What Happened After History Ended

If, at this point, you’re still reading, I consider it a miracle. After all, most Americans hardly seem to notice that the war in Afghanistan is still going on. To the extent that they’re paying attention at all, the public would, it seems, like U.S. troops to come home and the war to end.

That conflict, however, simply stumbles on amid continuing bad news with nary a soul in the streets to protest it. The longer it goes on, the less -- here in this country at least -- it seems to be happening (if, that is, you aren’t one of the 15,000 American troops stationed there or among their families and friends or the vets, their families and friends, who have been gravely damaged by their tours of duty in Kabul and beyond).

And if you’re being honest, can you really blame the public for losing interest in a war that they largely no longer fight, a war that they’re in no way called on to support (other than to idolizethe troops who do fight it), a war that they’re in no way mobilized for or against? In the age of the Internet, who has an attention span of 17 years, especially when the president just tweeted out his 47th outrageous comment of the week?

If you stop to think about it between those tweets, don’t you find it just a tad grim that, close enough to two decades later, this country is still fighting fruitlessly in a land once known by the ominous sobriquet “the graveyard of empires”? You know, the one whose tribal fighters outlasted Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the British, and the Russians.

Back in October 2001, you might have thought that the history lurking in that phrase would have given George W. Bush’s top officials pause before they decided to go after not just Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan but the Taliban, too. No such luck, of course -- then or since.

They were, of course, leading the planet’s last superpower, the only one left when the Soviet Union imploded after its Afghan war disaster, the one its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, grimly dubbed "the bleeding wound." They hadn’t the slightest doubt that the United States was exempt from history, that everyone else had already filled that proverbial graveyard and that there would never be a gravestone for them.After all, the U.S. was still standing, seemingly triumphant, when history officially “ended” (according to one of the neocon prophets of that moment).

In reality, when it comes to America’s spreading wars, especially the one in Afghanistan, history didn’t end at all. It just stumbled onto some graveyard version of a Möbius strip. In contrast to the past empires that found they ultimately couldn’t defeat Afghanistan’s insurgent tribal warriors, the U.S. has -- as Bush administration officials suspected at the time -- proven unique. Just not in the way they imagined.

Their dreams couldn’t have been more ambitious. As they launched the invasion of Afghanistan, they were already looking past the triumph to come to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the glories that would follow once his regime had been "decapitated," once U.S. forces, the most technologically advanced ever, were stationed for an eternity in the heart of the oil heartlands of the Greater Middle East. Not that anyone remembers anymore, but Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and the rest of that crew of geopolitical dreamers wanted it all.

What they got was no less unique in history: a great power at the seeming height of its strength and glory, with destructive capabilities beyond imagining and a military unmatched on the planet, unable to score a single decisive victory across an increasingly large swath of the planet or impose its will, however brutally, on seemingly far weaker, less well-armed opponents. [or not unique? Kennedy?] They could not conquer, subdue, control, pacify, or win the hearts and minds or anything else of enemies who often fought their trillion-dollar foe using weaponry valued at the price of a pizza. Talk about bleeding wounds!

A War of Abysmal Repetition

Thought of another way, the U.S. military is now heading into record territory in Afghanistan. In the mid-1970s, the rare American who had heard of that country knew it only as a stop on the hippie trail. If you had then told anyone here that, by 2018, the U.S. would have been at war there for 27 years (1979-1989 and 2001-2018), he or she would have laughed in your face. And yet here we are, approaching the mark for one of Europe’s longest, most brutal struggles, the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. Imagine that.

And just in case you’re paying no attention at all to the news from Afghanistan these days, rest assured that you don’t have to. You already know it!

To offer just a few examples, the New York Times recently revealed a new Trump administration plan to get U.S.-backed Afghan troops to withdraw from parts of the countryside, ceding yet more territory to the Taliban, to better guard the nation's cities. Here was the headline used: “Newest U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan Mirrors Past Plans for Retreat.” (“The withdrawal resembles strategies embraced by both the Bush and Obama administrations that have started and stuttered over the nearly 17-year war.”) And that generally is about as new as it gets when it comes to Afghan news in 2018.

Consider, for instance, a report from early July that began, “An American service member was killed and two others were wounded in southern Afghanistan on Saturday in what officials described as an ‘apparent insider attack’”; that is, he was killed by an armed Afghan government soldier, an ally, not an enemy. As it happened, I was writing about just such “insider” or “green-on-blue” violence back in July 2012 (when it was rampant) under the headline “Death by Ally” (“a message written in blood that no one wants to hear”). And despite many steps taken to protect U.S. advisers and other personnel from such attacks since, they’re still happening six years later.

Or consider the report, “Counternarcotics: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” issued this June by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR). Its focus:15 years of American efforts to suppress opium growing and the heroin trade in that country (at historic lows, by the way, when the U.S. invaded in 2001). More than eight and a half billion American dollars later, SIGAR found, opium remains the country’s largest cash crop, supporting “590,000 full-time jobs -- which is more people than are employed by Afghanistan’s military and security forces.”Oh, wait, historian Alfred McCoy was writing about just that at TomDispatch back in 2010 under the headline “Can Anyone Pacify the World’s Number One Narco-State?” (“In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.”)

Recently, SIGAR issued another report, this one on the rampant corruption inside just about every part of the Afghan government and its security forces, which are famously filled with scads of “ghost soldiers.” How timely, given that Ann Jones was focused on that very subject, endemic corruption in Afghanistan, at TomDispatch back in... hmmm, 2006, when she wrote, “During the last five years, the U.S. and many other donor nations pledged billions of dollars to Afghanistan, yet Afghans keep asking: ‘Where did the money go?’ American taxpayers should be asking the same question. The official answer is that donor funds are lost to Afghan corruption. But shady Afghans, accustomed to two-bit bribes, are learning how big-bucks corruption really works from the masters of the world.”

I could, of course, go on to discuss “surges” -- the latest being the Trump administration’s mini-one to bring U.S. troop levels there to 15,000 -- such surges having been a dime-a-dozen phenomena in these many years. Or the recent ramping up of the air war there (essentially reported with the same headlines you could have found over articles in... well... 2010) or the amount of territory the Taliban now controls (at record levels 17 years after that crew was pushed out of the last Afghan citythey controlled), but why go on? You get the point.

Almost 17 years and, coincidentally enough, 17 U.S. commanders later,think of it as a war of abysmal repetition. Just about everything in the U.S. manual of military tactics has evidently been tried (including dropping “the mother of all bombs,” the largest non-nuclearmunition in that military’s arsenal), often time and again, and nothing has even faintly done the trick -- to which the Pentagon’s response is invariably a version of the classic misquotedmovie line, “Play it again, Sam.”

And yet, amid all that repetition, people are still dying; Afghans and others are being uprooted and displaced across Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and deep into Africa; wars and terror outfits are spreading. And here’s a simple enough fact that’s worth repeating: the endless, painfully ignored failure of the U.S. military (and civilian) effort in Afghanistan is where it all began and where it seems never to end.

A Victory for Whom?

Every now and then, there’s the odd bit of news that reminds you we don’t have to be in a world of repetition. Every now and then, you see something and wonder whether it might not represent a new development, one that possibly could lead out of (or far deeper into) the graveyard of empires.

As a start, though it’s been easy to forget in these years, other countries are affected by the ongoing disaster of a war in Afghanistan. Think, for instance, of Pakistan (with a newly elected, somewhat Trumpian president who has been a criticof America’s Afghan War and of U.S. drone strikes in his country), Iran, China, and Russia. So here's something I can’t remember seeing in the news before: the military intelligence chiefs of those four countries all met recently in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, officially to discuss the growth of Islamic State-branded insurgents in Afghanistan. But who knows what was really being discussed? And the same applies to the visit of Iran’s armed forces chief of staff to Pakistan in July and the return visit of that country's chief of staff to Iran in early August. I can’t tell you what’s going on, only that these are not the typically repetitive stories of the last 17 years.

And hard as it might be to believe, even when it comes to U.S. policy, there’s been the odd headline that might pass for new. Take the recent private, direct talks with the Taliban in Qatar’s capital, Doha, initiated by the Trump administration and seemingly ongoing. They might -- or might not -- represent something new, as might President Trump himself, who, as far as anyone can tell, doesn’t think that Afghanistan is “the right war.” He has, from time to time, even indicated that he might be in favor of ending the American role, of “getting the hell out of there,” as he reportedly told Senator Rand Paul, and that’s unique in itself (though he and his advisers seem to be raring to go when it comes to what could be the next Afghanistan: Iran).

But should the man who would never want to be known as the president who lost the longest war in American history try to follow through on a withdrawal plan, he’s likely to have a few problems on his hands. Above all, the Pentagon and the country's field commanders seem to be hooked on America’s “infinite” wars. They exhibit not the slightest urge to stop them. The Afghan War and the others that have flowed from it represent both their raison d'être and their meal ticket. They represent the only thing the U.S. military knows how to do in this century. And one thing is guaranteed: if they don’t agree with the president on a withdrawal strategy, they have the power and ability to make a man who would do anything to avoid marring his own image as a winnner look worse than you could possibly imagine. Despite that military’s supposedly apolitical role in this country’s affairs, its leaders are uniquely capable of blocking any attempt to end the Afghan War.

And with that in mind, almost 17 years later, don’t think that victory is out of the question either. Every day that the U.S. military stays in Afghanistan is indeed a victory for... well, not George W. Bush, or Barack Obama, and certainly not Donald Trump, but the now long-dead Osama bin Laden. The calculation couldn’t be simpler. Thanks to his “precision” weaponry -- those 19 suicidal hijackers in commercial jets -- the nearly 17 years of wars he's sparked across much of the Muslim world cost a man from one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families a mere $400,000 to $500,000. They’ve cost American taxpayers, minimally, $5.6 trillion dollars with no end in sight. And every day the Afghan War and the others that have followed from it continue is but another triumphant day for him and his followers.

A sad footnote to this history of extreme repetition: I wish this essay, as its title suggests, were indeed the war piece to end all war pieces. Unfortunately, it’s a reasonable bet that, in August 2019, or August 2020, not to speak of August 2021, I’ll be repeating all of this yet again.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?440861-1/directorate-s

fEBRUARY 8, 2018

Directorate S

Steve Coll looks at the CIA’s secret wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the problematic relationship between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/donald-trump-wants-more-war-afghanistan

dyncorp bw minerals

...the U.S. is intensifying its air war in Afghanistan. During the month of June, the U.S. carried out 389 airstrikes—the highest monthly total in five years. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is seeking to send another 4,000 U.S. troops to join the 8,700 currently in Afghanistan.

This comes as The New York Times reports Trump may have found a reason to prolong the nearly 16-year war: Afghanistan’s untapped mineral deposits, which could be worth nearly a trillion dollars. Trump is being pressured by a billionaire financier and a chemical executive to escalate the U.S. war in Afghanistan in a bid to exploit the country’s mineral wealth. The Times reports Trump discussed Afghanistan’s vast deposits of metals and rare earth metals with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and is reportedly considering sending an envoy to Afghanistan to meet with mining officials.

...

ref

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/world/asia/afghanistan-trump-mineral-deposits.html

President Trump, searching for a reason to keep the United States in Afghanistan after 16 years of war, has latched on to a prospect that tantalized previous administrations: Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth, which his advisers and Afghan officials have told him could be profitably extracted by Western companies.

Mr. Trump has discussed the country’s mineral deposits with President Ashraf Ghani, who promoted mining as an economic opportunity in one of their first conversations. Mr. Trump, who is deeply skeptical about sending more American troops to Afghanistan, has suggested that this could be one justification for the United States to stay engaged in the country.

To explore the possibilities, the White House is considering sending an envoy to Afghanistan to meet with mining officials. Last week, as the White House fell into an increasingly fractious debate over Afghanistan policy, three of Mr. Trump’s senior aides met with a chemical executive, Michael N. Silver, to discuss the potential for extracting rare-earth minerals. Mr. Silver’s firm, American Elements, specializes in these minerals, which are used in a range of high-tech products.

Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who is informally advising Mr. Trump on Afghanistan, is also looking into ways to exploit the country’s minerals, according to a person who has briefed him. Mr. Feinberg owns a large military contracting firm, DynCorp International, which could play a role in guarding mines — a major concern, given that some of Afghanistan’s richest deposits are in areas controlled by the Taliban.

In 2010, American officials estimated that Afghanistan had untapped mineral deposits worth nearly $1 trillion, an estimate that was widely disputed at the time and has certainly fallen since, given the eroding price of commodities. But the $1 trillion figure is circulating again inside the White House, according to officials, who said it had caught the attention of Mr. Trump.

RELATED COVERAGE

Afghans Wary as Efforts Pick Up to Tap Mineral Riches SEPT. 8, 2012

Afghan Cabinet Blocks New Mining Laws JULY 23, 2012

Afghanistan Moves Quickly to Tap Newfound Mineral Reserves JUNE 17, 2010

Next for Afghanistan, the Curse of Plenty? JUNE 19, 201

The lure of Afghanistan as a war-torn Klondike is well established: In 2006, the George W. Bush administration conducted aerial surveys of the country to map its mineral resources. Under President Barack Obama, the Pentagon set up a task force to try to build a mining industry in Afghanistan — a challenge that was stymied by rampant corruption, as well as security problems and the lack of roads, bridges or railroads.

None of these hurdles has been removed in the last eight years, according to former officials, and some have worsened. They warn that the Trump administration is fooling itself if it believes that extracting minerals is a panacea for Afghanistan’s myriad ills.

“It would be dangerous to use the potential for resource exploitation as a selling point for military engagement,” said Laurel Miller, a senior analyst at RAND who served until last month as the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The barriers to entry are really quite considerable, and that kind of argument could fuel suspicion about America’s real intentions in Afghanistan.”

But for Mr. Trump, as a businessman, it is arguably the only appealing thing about Afghanistan. Officials said he viewed mining as a “win-win” that could boost that country’s economy, generate jobs for Americans and give the United States a valuable new beachhead in the market for rare-earth minerals, which has been all but monopolized by China.

China already has a $3 billion contract to develop a copper mine about 25 miles southeast of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Officials said Mr. Trump was determined not to spend American lives and treasure in Afghanistan only to watch China lock up its rare-earth deposits, which are used to make products from wind turbines to computer chips.

Mr. Silver, the chemical executive, may head an effort to maximize the rights for American companies to extract these minerals, according to a senior official.

Mr. Trump’s interest also reflects how his military advisers have struggled to present him with other persuasive reasons to send troops to the country, where the United States has been at war since 2001.

...

http://www.c-span.org/video/?406808-5/open-phones-sarah-chayes

corruption --> terrorism

We Blew $17 Billion in Afghanistan.

How Would You Have Spent It?

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/afghan

==-

Money as a Weapons System

by Megan McCloskey, Mike Tigas, Ryann Grochowski Jones, Sisi Wei, Jeff Larson, ProPublica, and Ingrid Burrington, Special to ProPublica

afgan // http://uprisingradio.org/home/2012/04/23/funding-the-enemy-how-us-taxpayers-bankroll-the-taliban/

parenti kpfa opium takes 1/5 water of wheat

cost/logistics of pullout http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f828c73&id=c48d76cdc7&e=8710facb33

intro cut)

Abolish the CIA!

By Chalmers Johnson

Steve Coll ends his important book on Afghanistan by quoting Afghan President Hamid Karzai: "What an unlucky country." Americans might find this a convenient way to ignore what their government did in Afghanistan between 1979 and the present, but luck had nothing to do with it. Brutal, incompetent, secret operations of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, frequently manipulated by the military intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, caused the catastrophic devastation of this poor country. On the evidence contained in Coll's book *Ghost Wars*, neither the Americans nor their victims in numerous Muslim and Third World countries will ever know peace until the Central Intelligence Agency has been abolished.

It should by now be generally accepted that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979 was deliberately provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski proudly confirmed Gates' assertion. "According to the official version of history," Brzezinski said, "CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that's to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention."

Asked whether he in any way regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied: "Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'"

Nouvel Observateur: "And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"

Brzezinski: "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

Even though the demise of the Soviet Union owes more to Mikhail Gorbachev than to Afghanistan's partisans, Brzezinski certainly helped produce "agitated Muslims," and the consequences have been obvious ever since. Carter, Brzezinski and their successors in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, including Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Colin Powell, all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land-mines that followed from their decisions. They must also share the blame for the blowback that struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. After all, al-Qaida was an organization they helped create and arm.

A Wind Blows in from Afghanistan

The term "blowback" first appeared in a classified CIA post-action report on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the interests of British Petroleum. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained: "When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Muhammad Mossadegh as Iran's prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its first effort to topple a foreign government would not be its last. The CIA, then just six years old and deeply committed to winning the Cold War, viewed its covert action in Iran as a blueprint for coup plots elsewhere around the world, and so commissioned a secret history to detail for future generations of CIA operatives how it had been done . . . Amid the sometimes curious argot of the spy world -- 'safebases' and 'assets' and the like -- the CIA warns of the possibilities of 'blowback.' The word . . . has since come into use as shorthand for the unintended consequences of covert operations."

"Blowback" does not refer simply to reactions to historical events but more specifically to reactions to operations carried out by the U.S. government that are kept secret from the American public and from most of their representatives in Congress. This means that when civilians become victims of a retaliatory strike, they are at first unable to put it in context or to understand the sequence of events that led up to it. Even though the American people may not know what has been done in their name, those on the receiving end certainly do: they include the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-73), Greece (1967-73), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979 to the present), El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to the present). Not surprisingly, sometimes these victims try to get even.

There is a direct line between the attacks on September 11, 2001 -- the most significant instance of blowback in the history of the CIA -- and the events of 1979. In that year, revolutionaries threw both the Shah and the Americans out of Iran, and the CIA, with full presidential authority, began its largest ever clandestine operation: the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the Islamic world....

(method)

In 1973, General Sardar Mohammed Daoud, the cousin and brother-in-law of King Zahir Shah, overthrew the king, declared Afghanistan a republic, and instituted a program of modernization. Zahir Shah went into exile in Rome. These developments made possible the rise of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a pro-Soviet communist party, which, in early 1978, with extensive help from the USSR, overthrew President Daoud. The communists' policies of secularization in turn provoked a violent response from devout Islamists. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to read. The fundamentalist Afghans opposed to this were supported by a triumvirate of nations -- the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia -- with quite diverse motives, but the U.S. didn't take these differences seriously until it was too late. By the time the Americans woke up, at the end of the 1990s, the radical Islamist Taliban had established its government in Kabul. Recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, it granted Osama bin Laden freedom of action and offered him protection from American efforts to capture or kill him.

Coll concludes: "The Afghan government that the United States eventually chose to support beginning in the late autumn of 2001 -- a federation of Massoud's organization [the Northern warlords], exiled intellectuals and royalist Pashtuns -- was available for sponsorship a decade before, but the United States could not see a reason then to challenge the alternative, radical Islamist vision promoted by Pakistani and Saudi intelligence . . . Indifference, lassitude, blindness, paralysis and commercial greed too often shaped American foreign policy in Afghanistan and South Asia during the 1990s."

Funding the Fundamentalists

The motives of the White House and the CIA were shaped by the Cold War: a determination to kill as many Soviet soldiers as possible and the desire to restore some aura of rugged machismo as well as credibility that U.S. leaders feared they had lost when the Shah of Iran was overthrown. The CIA had no intricate strategy for the war it was unleashing in Afghanistan. Howard Hart, the agency's representative in the Pakistani capital, told Coll that he understood his orders as: "You're a young man; here's your bag of money, go raise hell. Don't fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets." These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA's director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called "Maryknoll," on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA director under Reagan, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anti-Communists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by increasing the Catholic Church's reach and power he could contain Communism's advance, or reverse it. From Casey's convictions grew the most important U.S. foreign policies of the 1980s -- support for an international anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and sponsorship of state terrorism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Casey knew next to nothing about Islamic fundamentalism or the grievances of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the counter-strategy of covert action to thwart Soviet imperialism. He believed that the USSR was trying to strike at the U.S. in Central America and in the oil-producing states of the Middle East. He supported Islam as a counter to the Soviet Union's atheism, and Coll suggests that he sometimes conflated lay Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian extremist organization, of which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, was a passionate member. The Muslim Brotherhood's branch in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was strongly backed by the Pakistani army, and Coll writes that Casey, more than any other American, was responsible for welding the alliance of the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and the army of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan's military dictator from 1977 to 1988. On the suggestion of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization, Casey went so far as to print thousands of copies of the Koran, which he shipped to the Afghan frontier for distribution in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. He also fomented, without presidential authority, Muslim attacks inside the USSR and always held that the CIA's clandestine officers were too timid. He preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North.

Over time, Casey's position hardened into CIA dogma, which its agents, protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners and losers among the Afghan jihad's guerrilla leaders. The result, according to Coll, was that "Zia-ul-Haq's political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA's own." In the era after Casey, some scholars, journalists, and members of Congress questioned the agency's lavish support of the Pakistan-backed Islamist general Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with Ronald Reagan because he was an infidel. But Milton Bearden, the Islamabad station chief from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at Langley, vehemently defended Hekmatyar on the grounds that "he fielded the most effective anti-Soviet fighters."

Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, the CIA continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar's successor, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. When Edmund McWilliams, the State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1988-89, wrote that "American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war's end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan," CIA officials denounced him and planted stories in the embassy that he might be homosexual or an alcoholic. Meanwhile, Afghanistan descended into one of the most horrific civil wars of the 20th century. The CIA never fully corrected its naive and ill-informed reading of Afghan politics until after bin Laden bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998.

Fair-weather Friends

A co-operative agreement between the U.S. and Pakistan was anything but natural or based on mutual interests. Only two weeks after radical students seized the American Embassy in Tehran on November 5, 1979, a similar group of Islamic radicals burned to the ground the American Embassy in Islamabad as Zia's troops stood idly by. But the US was willing to overlook almost anything the Pakistani dictator did in order to keep him committed to the anti-Soviet jihad. After the Soviet invasion, Brzezinski wrote to Carter: "This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our non-proliferation policy." History will record whether Brzezinski made an intelligent decision in giving a green light to Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons in return for assisting the anti-Soviet insurgency.

Pakistan's motives in Afghanistan were very different from those of the U.S. Zia was a devout Muslim and a passionate supporter of Islamist groups in his own country, in Afghanistan, and throughout the world. But he was not a fanatic and had some quite practical reasons for supporting Islamic radicals in Afghanistan. He probably would not have been included in the U.S. Embassy's annual "beard census" of Pakistani military officers, which recorded the number of officer graduates and serving generals who kept their beards in accordance with Islamic traditions as an unobtrusive measure of increasing or declining religious radicalism -- Zia had only a moustache.

From the beginning, Zia demanded that all weapons and aid for the Afghans from whatever source pass through ISI hands. The CIA was delighted to agree. Zia feared above all that Pakistan would be squeezed between a Soviet-dominated Afghanistan and a hostile India. He also had to guard against a Pashtun independence movement that, if successful, would break up Pakistan. In other words, he backed the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan on religious grounds but was quite prepared to use them strategically. In doing so, he laid the foundations for Pakistan's anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir in the 1990s.

Zia died in a mysterious plane crash on August 17, 1988, four months after the signing of the Geneva Accords on April 14, 1988, which ratified the formal terms of the Soviet withdrawal. As the Soviet troops departed, Hekmatyar embarked on a clandestine plan to eliminate his rivals and establish his Islamic party, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the most powerful national force in Afghanistan. The U.S. scarcely paid attention, but continued to support Pakistan. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. lost virtually all interest in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar was never as good as the CIA thought he was, and with the creation in 1994 of the Taliban, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia transferred their secret support. This new group of jihadis proved to be the most militarily effective of the warring groups. On September 26, 1996, the Taliban conquered Kabul. The next day they killed the formerly Soviet-backed President Najibullah, expelled 8,000 female undergraduate students from Kabul University, and fired a similar number of women schoolteachers. As the mujahidin closed in on his palace, Najibullah told reporters: "If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism." His comments would prove all too accurate.

Pakistan's military intelligence officers hated Benazir Bhutto, Zia's elected successor, but she, like all post-Zia heads of state, including General Pervez Musharraf, supported the Taliban in pursuit of Zia's "dream" -- a loyal, Pashtun-led Islamist government in Kabul. Coll explains:

"Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one force able to frighten, flummox and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army. About a dozen Indian divisions had been tied up in Kashmir during the late 1990s to suppress a few thousand well-trained, paradise-seeking Islamist guerrillas. What more could Pakistan ask? The jihadist guerrillas were a more practical day-to-day strategic defense against Indian hegemony than even a nuclear bomb. To the west, in Afghanistan, the Taliban provided geopolitical 'strategic depth' against India and protection from rebellion by Pakistan's own restive Pashtun population. For Musharraf, as for many other liberal Pakistani generals, jihad was not a calling, it was a professional imperative. It was something he did at the office. At quitting time he packed up his briefcase, straightened the braid on his uniform, and went home to his normal life."

If the CIA understood any of this, it never let on to its superiors in Washington, and Charlie Wilson, a highly paid Pakistani lobbyist and former congressman for East Texas, was anything but forthcoming with Congress about what was really going on. During the 1980s, Wilson had used his power on the House Appropriations Committee to supply all the advanced weapons the CIA might want in Afghanistan. Coll remarks that Wilson "saw the mujahidin through the prism of his own whisky-soaked romanticism, as noble savages fighting for freedom, as almost biblical figures." Hollywood is now making a movie, based on the book Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile, glorifying the congressman who "used his trips to the Afghan frontier in part to impress upon a succession of girlfriends how powerful he was." Tom Hanks has reportedly signed on to play him.

Enter bin Laden and the Saudis

Saudi Arabian motives were different from those of both the U.S. and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia is, after all, the only modern nation-state created by jihad. The Saudi royal family, which came to power at the head of a movement of Wahhabi religious fundamentalists, espoused Islamic radicalism in order to keep it under their control, at least domestically. "Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth," Coll writes, "embraced the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African famine or a Turkish earthquake": "The money flowing from the kingdom arrived at the Afghan frontier in all shapes and sizes: gold jewelry dropped on offering plates by merchants' wives in Jedda mosques; bags of cash delivered by businessmen to Riyadh charities as zakat, an annual Islamic tithe; fat checks written from semi-official government accounts by minor Saudi princes; bountiful proceeds raised in annual telethons led by Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh." Richest of all were the annual transfers from the Saudi General Intelligence Department, or Istakhbarat, to the CIA's Swiss bank accounts.

From the moment agency money and weapons started to flow to the mujahidin in late 1979, Saudi Arabia matched the U.S. payments dollar for dollar. They also bypassed the ISI and supplied funds directly to the groups in Afghanistan they favored, including the one led by their own pious young millionaire, Osama bin Laden. According to Milton Bearden, private Saudi and Arab funding of up to $25 million a month flowed to Afghan Islamist armies. Equally important, Pakistan trained between 16,000 and 18,000 fresh Muslim recruits on the Afghan frontier every year, and another 6,500 or so were instructed by Afghans inside the country beyond ISI control. Most of these eventually joined bin Laden's private army of 35,000 "Arab Afghans."

Much to the confusion of the Americans, moderate Saudi leaders, such as Prince Turki, the intelligence chief, supported the Saudi backing of fundamentalists so long as they were in Afghanistan and not in Saudi Arabia. A graduate of a New Jersey prep school and a member of Bill Clinton's class of 1964 at Georgetown University, Turki belongs to the pro-Western, modernizing wing of the Saudi royal family. (He is the current Saudi ambassador to Great Britain and Ireland.) But that did not make him pro-American. Turki saw Saudi Arabia in continual competition with its powerful Shia neighbor, Iran. He needed credible Sunni, pro-Saudi Islamist clients to compete with Iran's clients, especially in countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have sizeable Shia populations.

Prince Turki was also irritated by the U.S. loss of interest in Afghanistan after its Cold War skirmish with the Soviet Union. He understood that the U.S. would ignore Saudi aid to Islamists so long as his country kept oil prices under control and cooperated with the Pentagon on the building of military bases. Like many Saudi leaders, Turki probably underestimated the longer term threat of Islamic militancy to the Saudi royal house, but, as Coll observes, "Prince Turki and other liberal princes found it easier to appease their domestic Islamist rivals by allowing them to proselytize and make mischief abroad than to confront and resolve these tensions at home." In Riyadh, the CIA made almost no effort to recruit paid agents or collect intelligence. The result was that Saudi Arabia worked continuously to enlarge the ISI's proxy jihad forces in both Afghanistan and Kashmir, and the Saudi Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom's religious police, tutored and supported the Taliban's own Islamic police force.

By the late 1990s, after the embassy bombings in East Africa, the CIA and the White House awoke to the Islamist threat, but they defined it almost exclusively in terms of Osama bin Laden's leadership of al-Qaida and failed to see the larger context. They did not target the Taliban, Pakistani military intelligence, or the funds flowing to the Taliban and al-Qaida from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they devoted themselves to trying to capture or kill bin Laden. Coll's chapters on the hunt for the al-Qaida leader are entitled, "You Are to Capture Him Alive," "We Are at War," and "Is There Any Policy?" but he might more accurately have called them "Keystone Kops" or "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight."

On February 23 1998, bin Laden summoned newspaper and TV reporters to the camp at Khost that the CIA had built for him at the height of the anti-Soviet jihad. He announced the creation of a new organization -- the International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders -- and issued a manifesto saying that "to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country." On August 7, he and his associates put this manifesto into effect with devastating truck bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The CIA had already identified bin Laden's family compound in the open desert near Kandahar Airport, a collection of buildings called Tarnak Farm. It's possible that more satellite footage has been taken of this site than of any other place on earth; one famous picture seems to show bin Laden standing outside one of his wives' homes. The agency conceived an elaborate plot to kidnap bin Laden from Tarnak Farm with the help of Afghan operatives and spirit him out of the country but CIA director George Tenet cancelled the project because of the high risk of civilian casualties; he was resented within the agency for his timidity. Meanwhile, the White House stationed submarines in the northern Arabian Sea with the map co-ordinates of Tarnak Farm preloaded into their missile guidance systems. They were waiting for hard evidence from the CIA that bin Laden was in residence.

Within days of the East Africa bombings, Clinton signed a top secret Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to use lethal force against bin Laden. On 20 August 1998, he ordered 75 cruise missiles, costing $750,000 each, to be fired at the Zawhar Kili camp (about seven miles south of Khost), the site of a major al-Qaida meeting. The attack killed 21 Pakistanis but bin Laden was forewarned, perhaps by Saudi intelligence. Two of the missiles fell short into Pakistan, causing Islamabad to denounce the U.S. action. At the same time, the U.S. fired 13 cruise missiles into a chemical plant in Khartoum: the CIA claimed that the plant was partly owned by bin Laden and that it was manufacturing nerve gas. They knew none of this was true.

Clinton had publicly confessed to his sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky on August 17, and many critics around the world conjectured that both attacks were diversionary measures. (The film Wag the Dog had just come out, in which a president in the middle of an election campaign is charged with molesting a Girl Scout and makes it seem as if he's gone to war against Albania to distract people's attention.) As a result Clinton became more cautious, and he and his aides began seriously to question the quality of CIA information. The U.S. bombing in May 1999 of the Chinese Embassyin Belgrade, allegedly because of faulty intelligence, further discredited the agency. A year later, Tenet fired one intelligence officer and reprimanded six managers, including a senior official, for their bungling of that incident.

The Clinton administration made two more attempts to get bin Laden. During the winter of 1998-99, the CIA confirmed that a large party of Persian Gulf dignitaries had flown into the Afghan desert for a falcon-hunting party, and that bin Laden had joined them. The CIA called for an attack on their encampment until Richard Clarke, Clinton's counter-terrorism aide, discovered that among the hosts of the gathering was royalty from the United Arab Emirates. Clarke had been instrumental in a 1998 deal to sell 80 F-16 military jets to the UAE, which was also a crucial supplier of oil and gas to America and its allies. The strike was called off.

The CIA as a Secret Presidential Army

Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration devoted major resources to the development of a long-distance drone aircraft called Predator, invented by the former chief designer for the Israeli air force, who had emigrated to the United States. In its nose was mounted a Sony digital TV camera, similar to the ones used by news helicopters reporting on freeway traffic or on O.J. Simpson's fevered ride through Los Angeles. By the turn of the century, Agency experts had also added a Hellfire anti-tank missile to the Predator and tested it on a mock-up of Tarnak Farm in the Nevada desert. This new weapons system made it possible instantly to kill bin Laden if the camera spotted him. Unfortunately for the CIA, on one of its flights from Uzbekistan over Tarnak Farm the Predator photographed as a target a child's wooden swing. To his credit, Clinton held back on using the Hellfire because of the virtual certainty of killing bystanders, and Tenet, scared of being blamed for another failure, suggested that responsibility for the armed Predator's use be transferred to the Air Force.

When the new Republican administration came into office, it was deeply uninterested in bin Laden and terrorism even though the outgoing national security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned Condoleezza Rice that it would be George W. Bush's most serious foreign policy problem. On August 6, 2001, the CIA delivered its daily briefing to Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, with the headline "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," but the president seemed not to notice. Slightly more than a month later, Osama bin Laden successfully brought off perhaps the most significant example of asymmetric warfare in the history of international relations.

Coll has written a powerful indictment of the CIA's myopia and incompetence, but he seems to be of two minds. He occasionally indulges in flights of pro-CIA rhetoric, describing it, for example, as a "vast, pulsing, self-perpetuating, highly sensitive network on continuous alert" whose "listening posts were attuned to even the most isolated and dubious evidence of pending attacks" and whose "analysts were continually encouraged to share information as widely as possible among those with appropriate security clearances." This is nonsense: the early-warning functions of the CIA were upstaged decades ago by covert operations.

Coll acknowledges that every president since Truman, once he discovered that he had a totally secret, financially unaccountable private army at his personal disposal, found its deployment irresistible. But covert operations usually became entangled in hopeless webs of secrecy, and invariably led to more blowback. Richard Clarke argues that "the CIA used its classification rules not only to protect its agents but also to deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations," and Peter Tomsen, the former US ambassador to the Afghan resistance during the late 1980s, concludes that "America's failed policies in Afghanistan flowed in part from the compartmented, top secret isolation in which the CIA always sought to work." Excessive, bureaucratic secrecy lies at the heart of the Agency's failures.

Given the Agency's clear role in causing the disaster of September 11, 2001, what we need today is not a new intelligence czar but an end to the secrecy behind which the CIA hides and avoids accountability for its actions. To this day, in the wake of 9/11 and the false warnings about a threat from Iraq, the CIA continues grossly to distort any and all attempts at a Constitutional foreign policy. Although Coll doesn't go on to draw the conclusion, I believe the CIA has outlived any Cold War justification it once might have had and should simply be abolished.

Chalmers Johnson's books includeBlowback,The Sorrows of Empire,andNemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which make up hisBlowback Trilogy, and his last bookDismantling the Empire. From 1967 to 1973, Johnson, a TomDispatch regular, served as a consultant to the CIA's Office of National Estimates.

...http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175578/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_chalmers_johnson%2C_the_cia_and_a_blowback_world/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=db3e64c238-TD_Johnson8_5_2012&utm_medium=email#more

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Afghanistan

top Taliban leaders are among the 5000 that Trump released last year over everyone's objections [when screwed kurds?]

An admission of colossal failure’: US dropped record number of bombs on Afghanistan in 2019Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams

Why the Afghanistan papers shows we never learned Noam Chomsky’s lesson from VietnamVijay Prashad / Independent Media Inst

America’s Afghanistan anti-drug boondoggle nears the $9 Billion markPhillip Smith / Independent Media inst

History

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Opium production in Afghanistan - Wikipedia

Last year's record opium production in Afghanistan threatens ...

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We Blew $17 Billion in Afghanistan.

An admission of colossal failure’: US dropped record number of bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams

Why the Afghanistan papers shows we never learned Noam Chomsky’s lesson from Vietnam Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Inst

America’s Afghanistan anti-drug boondoggle nears the $9 Billion mark Phillip Smith / Independent Media inst