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Britain Wants A Rerun Of The War On Afghanistan
Immediately after the Taliban victory an enormous dis-information campaign was launched to again badmouth them.
There are now suddenly all kinds of allegations that the Taliban are doing this or that bad. These are mostly based on hearsay and no or very little evidence is presented. Don't believe them without direct confirmation from original sources.
The launch of Amrullah Saleh and Ahmed Massoud as leaders of a new resistance against the Taliban must have been long prepared. One does not get op-ed space in the Washington Post and several big European papers just some three days after Kabul falls without some lead time and without serious 'western' backing.
While Saleh is an old CIA spy Ahmed Massoud has been prepared by the Brits:
After finishing his secondary school education in Iran, Massoud spent a year on a military course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.In 2012, he commenced an undergraduate degree in War Studies at King's College London where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 2015. He obtained his master's degree in International Politics from City, University of London in 2016.
The type of disinformation campaign combined with the well prepared launch of the 'resistance campaign', allegedly with SAS trained Afghan soldiers, and the regional op-ed placements let me conclude that he is run by the Brits. They are quite excellent in their 'strategic communication' disinformation business.
The conservatives speaking in their special parliament session were also the most angry about the outcome of their imperial war on Afghanistan and about their own inability to stop its end while claiming to be a 'Global Britain'.
As Richard Murphey remarks on Withering Britain:
This then is a massive moment for the role of the US in the world. It does not create a vacuum, but the risk that one might follow – which China will all too willingly seek to fill – seems very real at present.
And where does Britain fit into this? In a sense it does not. The US did not consults us, and is still not apparently telling us what it is doing in Kabul. We were not a player. There was no special, relationship. Our opinion was not worth having. It did not matter to the US. The pretence is over.
With that the vestige of British power, built on the coat-tails of the 1940s and the mutually advantageous myths formed since then, has gone. We are now just a rather remote, small, and fairly insignificant state who is just one amongst many. The delusion that we are otherwise has to go.
But will the delusion disappear? Will we, with its demise, stop building aircraft carriers that were strategically useless decades before they were designed? Will we stop thinking ourselves exceptional? And will an England thwarted become ever more aggressive towards its last vestiges of empire – those states it subjects to its rule within the supposed United Kingdom, which increasingly feels anything but that?
These are big questions. Only time can provide the answers. But I have a feeling that everything has changed. The image of British power has withered away. If all involved now deal with the reality for the these islands and their future that might be for the better. If at the same time we stop hectoring and abusing the world and actually learn to live with and work alongside it, so much the better too. But will we do that? That’s anyone’s guess. The wise will hope that we do.
That hope is, see above, in vain.
Stories about alleged Taliban acts 'against Afghan women' will now again get special features. Women have been used to sell the long war on Afghanistan since its very beginning. But how many women were actually killed by Soviet, British and U.S. bombs during the war?
On the abuse of feminism to promote the never ending war on Afghanistan, the badmouthing of the Taliban please read the excellent piece Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation which was co-written by a female anthropologist who has done field work there.
b, thanks for the link to “Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation” by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. Indeed an enlightening read, with lots of information, but one huge omission in it is that they make no mention of the fact that the US was responsible for deliberately inducing Wahhabi extremism and war in Afghanistan the late 1970’s.
So they are right to highlight that by 2001, “twenty-three years of war meant death, maiming, exile and refugee camps, poverty, so many kinds of grief, and endless fear and anxiety,” for the Afghan people, but fail to properly attribute the responsibility for that suffering to insidious US scheming.
They write “By 2001 Afghans had been trapped in war for twenty-three years, first a civil war between communists and Islamists, then a war between Islamists and Soviet invaders [..]” attributing the war just to “a civil war” and to “Islamists” when it was a war externally instigated and fueled by the US via Wahhabi extremists.
The following is a copy-paste of what I’ve posted previously. Apologies for this repeat, but I feel it’s important:
In 1979, the US began to covertly foster Wahhabi extremism in Afghanistan to, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, “induce” a brutal war in order to inflict on “the USSR its Vietnam war,” at the casual expense of thoroughly destroying the country and society of the people of Afghanistan for decades.
Robert Gates, the former Defense Secretary under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and former CIA director under George H. Bush and Ronald Reagan, stated in his 1996 memoirs “From the Shadows” that American intelligence services began to aid the opposing factions in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet deployment in 1979.
That confirms what Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter and also an adviser to Barack Obama, stated in a 1988 interview:
“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979.”
“But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
“That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap [..] The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war [..]”
– Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama, in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
From the book “Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia” by Ahmed Rashid:
“The US committed some four to five billion dollars between 1980 and 1992 in aid to the Mujaheddin. [..] Most of this aid was in the form of lethal modern weaponry [..] Prior to the war the Islamicists barely had a base in Afghan society, but with money and arms from the CIA pipeline and support from Pakistan, they built one and wielded tremendous clout.”
Posted by: Canadian Cents | Aug 20 2021 18:19 utc | 31
Some commenters here are practically lamenting the Bagram withdrawal from several weeks ago, and imagining all kinds of tinfoil scenarios.
As I said earlier, military-technical realities are not well understood by the general public.
First, there was a deal with the Taliban for the US to get out by May 1. That deal stipulated that neither side attack the other. The Talib held to their word fastidiously and did not attack US forces at all, right up to the present.
Biden then made the political decision to accept the deal and to complete the pullout, albeit with a little more time added. The plan was for the US to get completely out, but that the Kabul puppet government would hold on, and, crucially, that the US would continue with over-the-horizon air support, presumably from neighboring countries that would agree to host a US airbase.
That came to nothing, because EVERYBODY, including, crucially, Pakistan, said NO WAY!
The whole plan hinged on this: a pullout from the country, but keeping their hand in anyway.
That was just delusional wishcasting of course, as we now see. But it was hardly clear some weeks ago, when the US proceeded to pull out of Bagram.
That pullout was completely logical. Even the part about not telling the puppet government made sense, for a number of reasons. One, they could not really be trusted, as a lot of information has clearly been leaking from the puppets to Taliban, who of course have had their network of collaborators on the inside for a long time.
Those military assets, most crucially the combat aircraft, simply had to go, once the decision was made to pull out. You do not leave these kinds of assets like you would leave a humvee. Never mind the human assets, such as the highly trained pilots.
It is completely ridiculous now, to yap in hindsight about how this was a ‘mistake.’ No it was not a mistake. They had a plan, but that plan came to naught.
And I have already written here why that plan came to naught. Because nobody in the region agreed to go along with the US, or allow them to base in their country.
That in itself is a very clear signpost of how the geopolitics has shifted. The former Soviet ‘stans in particular were the real prize of the Afghan adventure all along. That’s why the US went in there. To make new Lithuanias and Polands out of them on Russia’s doorstep.
For a while, the US had some success here. Some of the ‘stans agreed to host US bases, but then later kicked them out. Why? Because they quickly found that the US works on the principle ‘give them an inch, and they will take a mile.’ A lot of color revolutions were stirred up by the US in those ‘stans. They learned their lesson.
At the same time, Russia was rising again as a world power. Many of these same ‘stans are still connected to Russian energy grids and road and rail networks. Millions of their nationals work in Russia and those remittances they send home are important. Also, they allied with Russia and China to fight terrorism in the region, which, curiously, kept increasing with the increasing US presence.
At the same time, China became a formidable world power. Iran also has been steadily rising, even under the ‘maximum pressure’ brought on by the west, and serving mostly the Zionist-colonial interests.
All three of these major powers have worked for years with the Taliban—about which we are only hearing now. For instance the Marandi piece that Grieved mentioned.
The SCO has now fully blossomed into a major force on the geopolitical stage. The coordination has been astonishing. Up until the very day the Talib walked into Kabul, the ‘stans in the SCO were blocking Iran’s ascension. It had been stuck in observer status for many years.
Now they have suddenly dropped their objections and Iran is in. As I said here already, we will see more and more snippets of this backstory unfold and how all this came about.
But the ‘stans are crucial. The same ethnic people, Tajiks and Uzbeks, are nearly as numerous in Afghanistan as the Talib’s tradiitional Pashtun base.
These are the border areas of the north, where these Tajiks and Uzbeks were the Northern Alliance that was always at war with the Talib. Yet this time around, they waltzed in and were welcomed.
The hand of the Russians was clearly visible, as Bhadrakumar noted, highlighting defense minister Shoigu’s statement, that ‘for us, the important thing is that the Taliban have secured the northern border areas’ [with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan].
This is an astonishing statement. It is practically saying, ‘we are relived that the Talib have succeeded.’
The lightning advance came only AFTER that painless handover of the key norther areas.
All of this caught the US flat-footed. They had no inkling of the coordination among the Talib and the majors powers. They really believed their own fantasies that they would get an airbase in the ‘stans, from which they could prosecute their over-the-horizon air war, while their Kabul puppets hung onto power.
As I think Patrick Armstrong put it, ‘they build their paralell universe and then try to move into it’ lol! 😸
So all of this was according to plan. But as Robert Burns put it in his ‘best laid plans of mice and men,’ things don’t always work out that way.
Also curious that some would actually be wailing about the Bagram pullout, and the well-deserved US faceplant, lol!
Posted by: Gordog | Aug 20 2021 22:48 utc | 75
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