By Pepe Escobar
July 08, 2022:
Information Clearing
House
-- "The
Cradel" --
Once upon
a time, in a galaxy not far away, the
Empire of Chaos launched the
so-called “War on Terror” against an
impoverished cemetery of empires at the
crossroads of Central and South Asia.
In the name of
national security, the land of the
Afghans was bombed until the Pentagon
ran out of targets, as their chief
Donald Rumsfeld, addicted to “known
unknowns,” complained at the time.
Operation
‘Enduring Captivity’
Civilian targets,
also knows as “collateral damage,” was
the norm for years. Multitudes had to
flee to neighboring nations to find
shelter, while tens of thousands were
incarcerated for unknown reasons, some
even dispatched to an illegal imperial
gulag on a tropical island in the
Caribbean.
War crimes were
duly perpetrated – some of them
denounced by an organization led by a
sterling journalist who was subsequently
subjected to years of
psychological torture by the same
Empire, obsessed with extraditing him
into its own prison dystopia.
All the time, the
smug, civilized ‘international
community’ – shorthand for the
collective west – was virtually deaf,
dumb and blind. Afghanistan was occupied
by over 40 nations – while repeatedly
bombed and droned by the Empire, which
suffered no condemnation for its
aggression; no package after package of
sanctions; no confiscation of hundreds
of billions of dollars; no punishment at
all.
The first
casualty of war
At the peak of
its unipolar moment, the Empire could
experiment with anything in
Afghanistan because impunity was the
norm. Two examples spring to mind:
Kandahar, Panjwayi district, March 2012:
an imperial soldier kills 16 civilians
and then burns their bodies. While in
Kunduz, April 2018: a graduation
ceremony receives a Hellfire missile
greeting, with over 30 civilians killed.
The final act of
the imperial “non-aggression” against
Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul
that did not hit “multiple suicide
bombers” but instead eviscerated
a family of 10, including several
children. The “imminent threat” in
question, identified as an “ISIS
facilitator” by US intelligence, was
actually an aid worker returning to meet
his family. The ‘international
community’ duly spewed imperial
propaganda for days until serious
questions started to be asked.
Questions also
keep emerging on the conditions
surrounding the Pentagon training of
Afghan pilots
to fly the Brazilian-built A-29 Super
Tucano between 2016 and 2020, which
completed over 2,000 missions providing
support for imperial strikes. During
training at Moody Air Force base in the
US, more than half of the Afghan pilots
actually went AWOL, and afterward, most
were quite uneasy with the pile up of
civilian ‘collateral damage.’ Of course
the Pentagon has kept no record of
Afghan victims.
What was extolled
instead by the US Air Force is how the
Super Tucanos dropped laser bombs on
‘enemy targets:’ Taliban fighters who
“like to hide in towns and places” where
civilians live. Miraculously, it was
claimed that the “precision” strikes
never “hurt the local people.”
That’s not
exactly what an Afghan refugee in
Britain, sent away by his family when he
was only 13,
revealed over a month ago, talking
about his village in Tagab: “All the
time there was fighting over there. The
village belongs to the Taliban (…) My
family is still there, I do not know if
they are alive or died. I don’t have any
contact with them.”
Drone
diplomacy
One of the first
foreign policy decisions of the Obama
administration in early 2009 was to
turbo-charge a drone war over
Afghanistan and the tribal areas in
Pakistan. Years later, a few
intelligence analysts from other NATO
nations started to vent off the record,
about CIA impunity: drone strikes would
get a green light even if killing scores
of civilians was a near certainty – as
it happened not only in ‘AfPak’ but also
across other war theaters in West Asia
and North Africa.
Nevertheless,
imperial logic is ironclad. The Taliban
were by definition “terra-rists” – in
trademark Bush drawl. By extension,
villages in Afghan deserts and mountains
were aiding and abetting “terra-rists,”
so eventual drone victims would never
raise a ‘human rights’ issue.
When Afghans – or
Palestinians – become collateral damage,
that’s irrelevant. When they become war
refugees, they are a threat. Yet
Ukrainian civilian deaths are
meticulously recorded and when they
become refugees, they are treated as
heroes.
A massive
‘data-driven defeat’
As former British
diplomat Alastair Crooke has
remarked, Afghanistan was the
definitive showcase for
technical managerialism, the test
bed for “every single innovation in
technocratic project management”
encompassing Big Data, Artificial
Intelligence and military sociology
embedded in ‘Human Terrain Teams’ – this
experiment helped spawn Empire’s
‘rules-based international order.’
But then, the
US-backed puppet regime in Kabul
collapsed not with a bang, but a
whimper: a spectacular “data-driven
defeat.”
Hell hath no fury
like Empire scorned. As if all the
bombing, droning, years of occupation
and serial collateral damage was not
misery enough, a resentful Washington
topped its performance by effectively
stealing $7 billion from the Afghan
central bank: that is, funds that belong
to roughly 40 million battered Afghan
citizens.
Now, exiled
Afghans are getting together trying to
prevent relatives from 9/11 victims in
the US to seize $3.5 billion of these
funds to pay off debts allegedly owed by
the Taliban – who have absolutely
nothing to do with 9/11.
Unlawful does not
even begin to qualify the confiscation
of assets from an impoverished nation
afflicted by a currency in free fall,
high inflation and a terrifying
humanitarian crisis, whose only ‘crime’
was to defeat the imperial occupation on
the battleground fair and square. By any
standards, would that persist, the
qualification of international war crime
applies. And collateral damage, in this
case, will mean the termination of any
“credibility” still enjoyed by the
“indispensable nation.”
The full amount
of foreign reserves should be
unequivocally returned to the Afghan
Central Bank. Yet everyone knows that’s
not going to happen. At best, a limited
monthly installment will be released,
barely enough to stabilize prices and
allow average Afghans to buy essentials
such as bread, cooking oil, sugar and
fuel.
The
west’s own ‘Silk Road’ was dead on
arrival
No one remembers
today that the US State Department came
up with its own New Silk Road idea in
July 2011, formally announced by
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
in a speech in India. Washington’s aim,
at least in theory, was to re-link
Afghanistan with Central/South Asia, yet
privileging security over the economy.
The spin was to
“turn enemies into friends and aid into
trade.” The reality, however, was to
prevent Kabul from falling into the
Russia/China sphere of influence –
represented by the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) – after the tentative
withdrawal of US troops in 2014 (the
Empire ended up formally being expelled
only in 2021).
The American Silk
Road would eventually allow the go-ahead
for projects such as the TAPI natural
gas pipeline, the CASA-1000 electricity
line, the Sheberghan thermal power
facility and a national fiber optic ring
in the telecom sector.
There was much
talk about “development of human
resources;” building infrastructure –
railways, roads, dams, economic zones,
resource corridors; promotion of good
governance; building the capacity of
“local stakeholders.”
A zombie
of an empire
In the end, the
Americans did less than nothing. The
Chinese, playing the long game, will be
leading Afghanistan’s resurgence, after
patiently waiting for the Empire to be
expelled.
Afghanistan for
its part will be welcomed into the real
New Silk Roads: the Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI), complete with
financing by the Silk Road Bank and the
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB),
and interconnecting with the
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC),
the Central Asian BRI corridor, and
eventually the Russian-led Eurasia
Economic Union (EAEU) and the
Iran-India-Russia-led International
North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
Now compare and
contrast with imperial minions NATO,
whose “new”
strategic concept boils down to
expanded warmongering against the Global
South, and beyond – including the outer
galaxies. At least we know that should
NATO ever be tempted back into
Afghanistan, then another ritual,
excruciating humiliation awaits.
