[Peace-discuss] Why Bush kills kids, & Obama wants more

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...the U.S. rulers -— and Bush, McCain and Obama -— have not backed off ... the 
biggest lie of all: That the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan is a legitimate war of 
self-defense launched in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and that 
the central goal is preventing future attacks on the U.S.  And now there are 
calls, including from Barack Obama, to send thousands of more troops to 
Afghanistan."

	October 17 / 20, 2008
	A War for Empire
	Afghanistan: Not a Good War Gone Bad
	By LARRY EVEREST

For the people of Azizabad, a small village in western Afghanistan, the dark 
early morning hours of August 22, 2008 suddenly turned into a nightmare of 
devastation and death. As villagers slept, U.S. forces attacked—first with guns, 
then air strikes. By the next morning, according to UN investigators, over 90 
people had been massacred, including 60 children and 15 women.

The U.S. military initially claimed they had hit a "legitimate" Taliban target, 
that only 5 to 7 civilians were killed—so-called "collateral damage"—and the 
other 30 to 35 dead were Taliban militants. These were lies.

Journalists who traveled to the village reported: "At the battle scene, shell 
craters dotted the courtyards and shrapnel had gouged holes in the walls. Rooms 
had collapsed and mud bricks and torn clothing lay in uneven mounds where people 
had been digging. In two places blood was splattered on a ceiling and a 
wall....The smell of bodies lingered in one compound, causing villagers to start 
digging with spades. They found the body of a baby, caked in dust, in the corner 
of a bombed-out room." Survivors "described repeated strikes on houses where 
dozens of children were sleeping, grandparents and uncles and aunts huddled 
inside with them." (New York Times, September 8, 2008)

"Does this look like it fits a Taliban fighter?" one resident told NPR (August 
27, 2008), holding up a tiny shoe and a woman’s torn veil.

This was the third major massacre of Afghan civilians by U.S.-NATO forces this 
summer alone. Since 2005, between 2,700 and 3,200 civilians are estimated to 
have been killed by U.S and NATO forces, whose attacks and bombing raids are 
escalating. And all this is just the latest example of the enormous suffering 
the U.S.-NATO war on Afghanistan has inflicted since it was launched seven years 
ago on October 7, 2001.

The U.S. military has since been forced to back off of its initial claims about 
Azizabad, and is supposedly conducting an "investigation." But one thing the 
U.S. rulers—and Bush, McCain and Obama—have not backed off of is the biggest lie 
of all: That the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan is a legitimate war of 
self-defense launched in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and that 
the central goal is preventing future attacks on the U.S. And now there are 
calls, including from Barack Obama, to send thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.

Not a "Good War" Gone Bad

One thing that’s not been up for debate in the Presidential campaign is 
Afghanistan: both candidates (not to mention George W. Bush) agree on the urgent 
need to escalate – and win – that war. This stance has overwhelmingly gone 
unchallenged – even by most who opposed the invasion of Iraq. But the war in 
Afghanistan is not the proverbial "good war," now gone bad. It was an unjust, 
imperialist war of conquest and empire from the start. And it continues to be an 
unjust, imperialist war of empire today.

The war in Afghanistan was never simply a response to 9/11. It was conceived of 
by the Bush administration as the opening salvo in an unbounded war for greater 
empire under the rubric of a "war on terror." This war’s goal was to defeat 
Islamic fundamentalism, overthrow states not fully under U.S. control, 
restructure the Middle East and Central Asian regions, and seize deeper control 
of key sources and shipment routes of strategic energy supplies. All this grew 
out of over a decade of imperialist planning, strategizing and intervention. And 
from the beginning all of it was part of an overall plan to expand and fortify 
U.S. power—to create an unchallenged and unchallengeable global imperialist empire.

All this is shown by what the U.S. rulers were doing—and planning—in these 
regions and globally during the decade of the 1990s, including in Afghanistan 
itself. It can be shown by the plans the U.S. had for destabilizing, perhaps 
overthrowing, the Taliban government of Afghanistan even before 9/11. It can be 
demonstrated by the actual discussions and decisions taken by the Bush regime in 
the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and by the U.S.’s war objectives in Afghanistan 
and the Middle East as a whole, which it is still pursuing. And it can be shown 
by the U.S.’s conduct of the war and the impact it has had on the people of 
Afghanistan.

1990s: A Decade of Planning and Strategizing for Greater Empire

The "war on terror" and the invasion of Afghanistan emerged from a decade of 
planning, strategizing, and struggle among the U.S. rulers over how to expand 
and strengthen their grip on the planet.

The 1991 collapse of the social-imperialist Soviet Union was a geopolitical 
earthquake. Suddenly the U.S. rulers found themselves no longer facing a rival 
nuclear-armed, imperialist empire. They called it a unique "unipolar moment," 
where the U.S. faced no major rivals to its global pre-eminence. But in the wake 
of the Soviet collapse, they faced new and daunting challenges—the possible rise 
of new rivals (Russia, China, the European Union or some combination thereof), 
massive economic shifts brought about by the Soviet bloc’s collapse and the 
acceleration of capitalist globalization, destabilizing problems in the oil-rich 
Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and a growing number of 
impoverished, war-torn, or fragmented states (so-called "failed states") whose 
collapse could unravel the U.S.-dominated global order.

Right after the Soviet collapse, a core of imperial strategists—the 
neoconservatives or neocons—began arguing that the U.S. should lock in this 
unipolar world and prevent any rivals from emerging to challenge the U.S.

This was articulated in the Defense Department’s 1992 "Defense Planning 
Guidance"—written by Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad under the 
direction of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney—all later top officials in the 
Bush II administration. This document argued that the U.S. should insure "that 
no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the 
territory of the former Soviet Union" and that the United States remain the 
world’s predominant power for the indefinite future. The Defense Guidance 
envisioned accomplishing these far-reaching objectives by preemptively attacking 
rivals or states seeking weapons of mass destruction, strengthening U.S. control 
of Persian Gulf oil, and refusing to allow international coalitions or law to 
inhibit U.S. freedom of action.

The Clinton administration had sought to strengthen and expand U.S. economic, 
military and political power around the world—including through military 
aggression in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and the Balkans.

But for the neocons, this wasn’t nearly enough. Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born 
American and one time advisor to the Unocal oil company, was a key player in the 
neocon offensive. Later he would become a top official in the Bush 
regime—including as ambassador first to Afghanistan following the U.S. 
occupation, and then to Iraq. During the 1990s, Khalilzad condemned the lack of 
a "unifying concept" in the Clinton global vision, and argued for focusing on 
preventing others from having "hegemony over critical regions," including the 
Persian Gulf.

Over the decade of the 1990s, this core in the ruling class continued to flesh 
out and fight for this vision—in numerous research papers, think-tank seminars, 
opinion pieces, and efforts like the "Project for a New American Century" and 
the "Clean Break" policy paper written for Israel’s leadership. Along with this 
global strategizing, they led a growing chorus demanding more aggressive action 
against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, including overthrowing it, as well as 
increasing efforts to take action against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. All 
this, again, was years before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Afghanistan—Great Power Rivalry and Energy Pipelines

During the 1990s, Afghanistan was one focal point of U.S. efforts to strengthen 
Why its grip on global energy sources and military-political supremacy. 
Afghanistan sits at the very heart of the Eurasian land mass. In 1997, Zbigniew 
Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter administration, argued, "A 
power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most 
advanced and economically productive regions.... About 75 percent of the world’s 
people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as 
well...Eurasia accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s GNP and about 
three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources." (Zbigniew Brzezinski, The 
Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic 
Books, New York, 1997)

Following the Soviet collapse, relations in the region were shifting rapidly. 
Five Central Asian Republics—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan 
and Kyrgyzstan—formerly part of the Soviet Union were unmoored and up for grabs.

As A World to Win magazine analyzed in 2001: "As the Soviets retreated in the 
early 1990s, the U.S. imperialists thus embarked upon a policy to replace Soviet 
influence over the Central Asian countries with their own, to connect them into 
the world market and to break up the Russian monopoly over the pipelines to that 
market. They also set out to build an alternative to the Persian Gulf region as 
a key energy supply in order to reinforce the U.S.’s dominant global position. 
One of the key aspects of this was, of course, preventing Russia from 
re-emerging as a major rival in the region. The pipeline the U.S. needed had to 
cross through Afghanistan to Pakistan to the open seas in order to freely access 
the Western market." ("A History of the Imperialist ‘Great Game,’" A World to 
Win, 2002/28) The U.S. also sought to weaken and isolate the Islamic Republic of 
Iran by preventing pipelines from being built through Iran—a natural bridge to 
the Persian Gulf—and by surrounding it with hostile states. This was another 
reason the U.S. initially supported the Taliban in Afghanistan—it served as a 
"Sunni buffer" on Iran’s eastern border.

Gaining control of Afghanistan was seen by the Clinton administration as a 
crucial element of this strategy. So in 1996, when the Islamic fundamentalists 
of the Taliban seized power, after four years of bitter civil war following the 
overthrow of the pro-Soviet Najibullah regime, the imperialists supported them 
in hopes they could stabilize Afghanistan and partner with the U.S. The Bush 
administration initially continued to maintain ties with the Taliban—approving 
over $40 million in financial aid in May 2001.

Turning Against the Taliban

But even as they were approving this aid, and before September 11, 2001, the 
U.S. was also turning against the Taliban regime, including by planning to 
destabilize and possibly overthrow it. One such plan hit Bush’s desk on 
September 10.

The U.S. rulers’ concerns had nothing to do with the reactionary, theocratic 
nature of the Taliban, which mainly represented the feudal classes and tribes of 
Afghanistan’s largest nationality, the Pashtun. Instead, they were concerned 
that the Taliban was becoming a dangerous opponent, standing in the way of the 
U.S. regional agenda and global plans.

First, a civil war continued to smolder in Afghanistan, which the Taliban proved 
unable to stamp out. This made it impossible to go forward with plans for 
building an oil pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Second, the Taliban’s 
actions and this ongoing instability were fueling radical Islamic 
fundamentalism, which was increasingly viewed as a key problem by U.S. 
strategists. This was driven home to them by the 1998 bombings of the U.S. 
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The U.S. blamed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, 
which were based in Afghanistan. (The Clinton administration launched cruise 
missile strikes in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda camps after these attacks.)

These growing tensions led the U.S. to begin building covert anti-Taliban 
networks in Afghanistan as early as 1997. This included providing millions of 
dollars in aid to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and dispatching secret 
teams to work with them. (The Taliban leadership was reportedly ready to turn 
bin Laden over to the imperialists or at the very least have him leave the 
country until the U.S.’s 1998 missile strikes convinced them they too were a 
target of the imperialists.)

Such planning was stepped up after George W. Bush came to power. Before 
September 11, 2001, there were sharp divisions within the Bush regime over 
whether to focus on non-state Islamist "terrorists" like al-Qaeda or states such 
as Iraq. But plans to step up attacks on al-Qaeda and destabilize the Taliban 
regime—perhaps even overthrow it—were being developed and debated. In his book 
Bush at War, Bob Woodward reports that in April 2001—5 months before the attacks 
of September 11—plans were in the works to begin arming the Northern Alliance. 
By July, proposals were put forward to not only roll back al-Qaeda, but to 
eliminate it and "go on the offensive and destabilize the Taliban." Although the 
divisions within the Bush team had not been resolved, this plan was approved on 
September 4, with $125-200 million given the CIA to implement it. It was placed 
on Bush’s desk by National Security Advisor Rice on September 10 as a secret 
Presidential Directive, awaiting his signature.

[Larry Everest is the author of Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global 
Agenda (Common Courage 2004), a correspondent for Revolution (www.revcom.us) and 
a contributor to Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney (Seven 
Stories). He can be reached via www.larryeverest.com.]

http://www.counterpunch.org/everest10172008.html