Lies
About American Progress in Afghanistan
By
Matthew Hoh
August
22, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- There has never been progress by the US
military in Afghanistan, unless you are asking
the US military contractors or the Afghan drug
barons, of whom an extremely large share are our
allies in the Afghan government, militias and
security forces, there has only been suffering
and destruction. American
politicians, pundits and generals will speak
about “progress” made by the 70 000 American
troops put into Afghanistan by President Obama
beginning in 2009, along with an additional 30
000 European troops and 100 000 private
contractors, however, the hard and awful true
reality is that the war in Afghanistan has only
escalated since 2009, never stabilising or
de-escalating.
The
Taliban has increased in strength by tens of
thousands, despite tens of thousands of
casualties and prisoners; and American and
Afghan casualties have continued to grow every
year of the conflict, with US casualties
declining only when US forces began to withdraw
in numbers from parts of Afghanistan in 2011,
while Afghan security forces and civilians have
experienced record casualties every year since
those numbers began to be kept by the UN.
Similarly, any progress in reconstructing or
developing Afghanistan has been found to be near
existent despite the more than $100 billion
spent by the United States on such efforts by
the Special Inspector General for Afghan
Reconstruction (SIGAR).
$100
billion, by the way, is more money than was
spent on the Marshall Plan when that post-WWII
reconstruction plan is put into
inflation-adjusted dollars. Often repeated
claims, such as millions of Afghan school girls
going to school, millions of Afghans having
access to improved health care and Afghan life
expectancy dramatically increasing, and the
construction of an Afghan job building economy
have been exposed as nothing more than public
relations lies.
Often
displayed as modern Potemkin Villages to
visiting journalists and congressional
delegations and utilised to justify continued
budgets for the Pentagon and USAID, and, so, to
allow for more killing, like America’s
reconstruction programme in Iraq, the
reconstruction programme in Afghanistan has
proven to be a failure and its supposed
achievements shown to be virtually non-existent,
as documented by multiple investigations by
SIGAR, as well as by investigators and
researchers from organisations such as the UN,
EU, IMF, World Bank, etc.
The
American people will hear again the great lie
about the progress the American military once
made in Afghanistan after “the Afghan Surge”,
just as we often hear the lie about how the
American military had “won” in Iraq.
In
Iraq, it was a political compromise that brought
about a cessation of hostilities for a few short
years and it was the collapse of the political
balance that had been struck that led to the
return to the violence of the last several
years.
In
Afghanistan, there has never even been an
attempt at such a political solution and all the
Afghan people have seen in the last eight years,
every year, worsening of the violence.
Americans will also hear tonight how the US
military has done great things for the Afghan
people. You would be hard pressed to find many
Afghans outside of the incredibly corrupt and
illegitimate government, a better definition of
a kleptocracy you will not find, that the US
keeps in power with its soldiers and $35 billion
a year, who would agree with the statements of
the American politicians, the American generals
and the pundits, the latter of which are mostly
funded, directly or indirectly, by the military
companies.
It is
important to remember that for three straight
elections in Afghanistan, the United States
government has supported shockingly fraudulent
elections, allowing American soldiers to kill
and die while presidential and parliamentary
elections were brazenly stolen.
It is
also important to remember that many members of
the Afghan government are themselves warlords
and drug barons, many of them guilty of some of
the worst human rights abuses and war crimes,
the same abuses of which the Taliban are guilty,
while the current Ghani government, and the
previous Karzai government, have allowed
egregious crimes to continue against women,
including laws that allow men to legally rape
their wives. Whatever President Trump announces
about Afghanistan, a decision he teased on
Twitter, as if the announcement were a new
retail product launch or television show
episode, as opposed to the sombre and painful
reality of war, we can be assured the lies about
American progress in Afghanistan will continue,
the lies about America’s commitment to human
rights and democratic values will continue, the
profits of the military companies and drug
barons will also continue, and of course the
suffering of the Afghan people will surely
continue.
Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards
of Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace and World
Beyond War. In 2009, he resigned from his
position with the State Department in
Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of the
Afghan War by the Obama Administration. He
previously had been in Iraq with a State
Department team and with the US Marines. He is a
senior fellow with the Centre for International
Policy.
This article was first published by
The Herald
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