America's Phoney War in Afghanistan: Al Qaeda Doesn't
Exist As A Threat
04 May 2010By William Engdahl
One of
the most remarkable aspects of the Obama Presidential
agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the
media or elsewhere why at all the United States
Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of
Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one
of which can be admitted openly to the public at
large.
Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many
troops are needed to "win" the war in Afghanistan,
whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at
least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US
military presence in that pivotal Central Asian
country is obscured.
Even during the 2008 Presidential campaign candidate
Obama argued that Afghanistan not Iraq was where the
US must wage war. His reason? Because he claimed, that
was where the Al Qaeda organization was holed up and
that was the "real" threat to US national security.
The reasons behind US involvement in Afghanistan is
quite another one.
The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons.
First to restore and control the world's largest
supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to
use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against
opponents, especially Russia. That control of the
Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of
the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.
Geopolitics of Afghan Opium
According even to an official UN report, opium
production in Afghanistan has risen dramatically since
the downfall of the Taliban in 2001. UNODC data shows
more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past four
growing seasons (2004-2007), than in any one year
during Taliban rule. More land is now used for opium
in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin
America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world
market originated in Afghanistan. This is no accident.
It has been documented that Washington hand-picked the
controversial Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun warlord from the
Popalzai tribe, long in the CIA's service, brought him
back from exile in the USA, created a Hollywood
mythology around his "courageous leadership of his
people." According to Afghan sources, Karzai is the
Opium "Godfather" of Afghanistan today. There is
apparently no accident that he was and is today still
Washington's preferred man in Kabul. Yet even with
massive vote buying and fraud and intimidation,
Karzai's days could be ending as President.
The second reason the US military remains in
Afghanistan long after the world has forgotten even
who the mysterious Osama bin Laden and his alleged Al
Qaeda terrorist organization is or even if they exist,
is as a pretext to build a permanent US military
strike force with a series of permanent US airbases
across Afghanistan. The aim of those bases is not to
eradicate any Al Qaeda cells that may have survived in
the caves of Tora Bora, or to eradicate a mythical
"Taliban" which at this point according to eyewitness
reports is made up overwhelmingly of local ordinary
Afghanis fighting to rid their land once more of
occupier armies as they did in the 1980's against the
Russians.
The aim of the US bases in Afghanistan is to target
and be able to strike at the two nations which today
represent the only combined threat in the world today
to an American global imperium, to America's Full
Spectrum Dominance as the Pentagon terms it.
The lost `Mandate of Heaven'
The problem for the US power elites around Wall Street
and in Washington is the fact that they are now in the
deepest financial crisis in their history. That crisis
is clear to the entire world and the world is acting
on a basis of self-survival. The US elites have lost
what in Chinese imperial history is known as the
Mandate of Heaven. That mandate is given a ruler or
ruling elite provided they rule their people justly
and fairly. When they rule tyrannically and as
despots, oppressing and abusing their people, they
lose that Mandate of Heaven.
If the powerful private wealthy elites that have
controlled essential US financial and foreign policy
for most of the past century or more ever had a
"mandate of Heaven" they clearly have lost it. The
domestic developments towards creation of an abusive
police state with deprivation of Constitutional rights
to its citizens, the arbitrary exercise of power by
non elected officials such as Treasury Secretaries
Henry Paulson and now Tim Geithner, stealing trillion
dollar sums from taxpayers without their consent in
order to bailout the bankrupt biggest Wall Street
banks, banks deemed "Too Big To Fail," this all
demonstrates to the world they have lost the mandate.
In this situation, the US power elites are
increasingly desperate to maintain their control of a
global parasitical empire, called deceptively by their
media machine, "globalization. " To hold that
dominance it is essential that they be able to break
up any emerging cooperation in the economic, energy or
military realm between the two major powers of Eurasia
that conceivably could pose a challenge to future US
sole Superpower control—China in combination with
Russia.
Each Eurasian power brings to the table essential
contributions. China has the world's most robust
economy, a huge young and dynamic workforce, an
educated middle class. Russia, whose economy has not
recovered from the destructive end pf the Soviet era
and of the primitive looting during the Yeltsin era,
still holds essential assets for the combination.
Russia's nuclear strike force and its military pose
the only threat in the world today to US military
dominance, even if it is largely a residue of the Cold
War. The Russian military elites never gave up that
potential.
As well Russia holds the world's largest treasure of
natural gas and vast reserves of oil urgently needed
by China. The two powers are increasingly converging
via a new organization they created in 2001 known as
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). That
includes as well as China and Russia, the largest
Central Asia states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
The purpose of the alleged US war against both Taliban
and Al Qaeda is in reality to place its military
strike force directly in the middle of the
geographical space of this emerging SCO in Central
Asia. Iran is a diversion. The main goal or target is
Russia and China.
Officially, of course, Washington claims it has built
its military presence inside Afghanistan since 2002 in
order to protect a "fragile" Afghan democracy. It's a
curious argument given the reality of US military
presence there.
In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build
nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of
Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The
nine are in addition to the three major US military
bases already installed in the wake of its occupation
of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, ostensibly to
isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin
Laden.
The Pentagon built its first three bases at Bagram Air
Field north of Kabul, the US' main military logistics
center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan;
and Shindand Air Field in the western province of
Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan,
was constructed a mere 100 kilometers from the border
of Iran, and within striking distance of Russia as
well as China.
Afghanistan has historically been the heartland for
the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for
control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th
Centuries. British strategy then was to prevent Russia
at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby
threatening Britain's imperial crown jewel, India.
Afghanistan is similarly regarded by Pentagon planners
as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US
military power could directly threaten Russia and
China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East
lands. Little has changed geopolitically over more
than a century of wars.
Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location,
straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle
East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil
pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the
Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along
with Enron and Cheney's Halliburton, had been in
negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring
natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and
Pakistan to Enron's huge natural gas power plant at
Dabhol near Mumbai. Karzai, before becoming puppet US
president, had been a Unocal lobbyist.
Al Qaeda doesn't exist as a threat
The truth of all this deception around the real
purpose in Afghanistan becomes clear on a closer look
at the alleged "Al Qaeda" threat in Afghanistan.
According to author Erik Margolis, prior to the
September 11,2001 attacks, US intelligence was giving
aid and support both to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda.
Margolis claims that "The CIA was planning to use
Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda to stir up Muslim Uighurs
against Chinese rule, and Taliban against Russia's
Central Asian allies."
The US clearly found other means of stirring up Muslim
Uighurs against Beijing last July via its support for
the World Uighur Congress. But the Al Qaeda "threat"
remains the lynchpin of Obama US justification for his
Afghan war buildup.
Now, however, the National Security Adviser to
President Obama, former Marine Gen. James Jones has
made a statement, conveniently buried by the friendly
US media, about the estimated size of the present Al
Qaeda danger in Afghanistan. Jones told Congress, "The
al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum
estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no
bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or
our allies."
That means that Al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes,
does not exist in Afghanistan. Oops…
Even in neighboring Pakistan, the remnants of Al-Qaeda
are scarcely to be found. The Wall Street Journal
reports, "Hunted by US drones, beset by money problems
and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the
bleak mountains of Pakistan, al Qaeda is seeing its
role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to
intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials.
For Arab youths who are al Qaeda's primary recruits,
`it's not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,'
said a senior U.S. official in South Asia."
If we follow the statement to its logical consequence
we must conclude then that the reason German soldiers
are dying along with other NATO youth in the mountains
of Afghanistan has nothing to do with "winning a war
against terrorism." Conveniently most media chooses to
forget the fact that Al Qaeda to the extent it ever
existed, was a creation in the 1980's of the CIA, who
recruited and trained radical muslims from across the
Islamic world to wage war against Russian troops in
Afghanistan as part of a strategy developed by
Reagan's CIA head Bill Casey and others to create a
"new Vietnam" for the Soviet Union which would lead to
a humiliating defeat for the Red Army and the ultimate
collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now US NSC head Jones admits there is essentially no
Al Qaeda anymore in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is time
for a more honest debate from our political leaders
about the true purpose of sending more young to die
protecting the opium harvests of Afghanistan.
F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum
Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World
Order. He may be reached via his website at
www.engdahl. oilgeopolitics. net
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