Why Are We In Afghanistan? Americans Question

25 August 2009

By David Skrbina

As we approach the eight-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan — the "good" war — we should ask ourselves an embarrassingly simple question: Why are we there? Amidst talk of troop levels, suicide bombings, coalition casualties, and "democratic" elections, more fundamental questions arise. How did we get there? What are we doing? What do we hope to achieve? These salient points are rarely verbalized and never honestly answered. But only by investigating such questions can we truly understand what is happening in that distant land, and by extension, how things work here at home.

U.S. soldiers Anthony Salinas (R) and Korey Stealy (L) of 2-12 Infantry 4BCT-4ID Task Force Mountain Warriors run for cover from arms fire in Honaker Miracle camp at the Pesh valley of Kunar Province, August 19, 2009. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The usual explanation, the one we get from the government and mass media, is a simplistic two-part story. We are in Afghanistan to "fight terrorism" and to "find Osama bin Laden." Bin Laden's whereabouts are still unknown, after an eight-year manhunt and despite a $50 million bounty on his head. Evaluating any "war on terror" is difficult, but one indication is a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal (Aug 10, 2009): "Taliban now winning." Hence both explanations indicate evident failures.

Given this situation, a third explanation has recently surfaced. We are there to "disrupt the opium trade." But such enforced military interventions are neither effective nor legal; our last major drug effort — the 1989 invasion of Panama — was explicitly declared by the UN General Assembly to be a "flagrant violation of international law." (A/RES/44/240) . In fact, there are "terrorists" and drugs everywhere; something else is clearly at work in the case of Afghanistan.

Here, then, it is best to go back to the beginning—in this case, to 9/11. Recall the events of that day. The first plane hit the North Tower of the WTC at 8:46 am, and the South Tower was hit at 9:03. At 9:17 am, a mere 30 minutes after the first impact, CBS announced that bin Laden was a leading suspect. CNN repeated this statement at 9:55 am, and NBC a few minutes after that. Shortly after noon the FBI announced that bin Laden was the prime suspect.

Now, it must be admitted that this was an astounding piece of investigative work on the part of our government and media. In the midst of the chaos of 9/11, with buildings collapsing and planes attacking the Pentagon, and in spite of our official policy that the U.S. government had no foreknowledge whatsoever of the attacks, we knew within a matter of minutes, and to a high degree of certainty, that bin Laden was to blame. And we were going to get him and anyone who harbored him.

In the rest of the civilized world, a terrorist attack is treated as a criminal act. As such, the appropriate response would have been through legal, judicial, and diplomatic channels — to investigate the crime, identify those responsible in an objective manner, and bring them to justice. In such a complex case as this, we would have expected the process to take months, if not years. Instead, the U.S. issued a near-immediate demand to the Taliban government in Afghanistan to hand over bin Laden. The Taliban offered to comply, on the condition that we provide evidence of his involvement. Having none, we simply repeated our demand. They refused. Our patience ran out just three weeks later, and we started launching cruise missiles into Kabul on October 7. By the end of November, thousands of U.S. combat troops were on the ground, and "Operation Enduring Freedom" had swung into high gear.

Strange, then, that a full eight months later, in June 2002, FBI director Robert Mueller's testimony before the U.S. Senate demonstrated much less certainty. The Washington Post reported (June 6, 2002) on Mueller's hesitations: "investigators believe the idea of the Sept 11 attacks…came from al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan…and the financing came through the UAE from sources in Afghanistan. " "I think we're confident that he [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, not bin Laden!] was one of the key figures" in the attacks, said Mueller. At the time both Mohammed and bin Laden were "believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, " but the former was captured nine months later—in Pakistan. Mueller "appeared to stress that the origins of the Sept 11 plot lay in Afghanistan" and "we think the masterminds of it were [there]." So instead of firm and incontrovertible evidence, Mueller offered us qualified hesitations: "we believe," "I think," and "alleged involvement. " This, eight months after carpet bombings and targeted killings had begun in earnest.

To this day, the FBI is apparently unsure of its own conclusions. The fbi.gov Website has a list of the "most wanted terrorists." Of the 24 individuals shown, 23 are Muslims or Arabs (this alone tells us something about our government's definition of "terrorist") . One of these is bin Laden; he is wanted for the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa and other unspecified "terrorists attacks throughout the world," but not explicitly for 9/11!

Today, eight years after the fact, we are not much better off. We have the tortured "confession" of Mohammed, which is worth little more than the paper it's written on. We have video evidence of bin Laden admitting responsibility for 9/11, but this undated video speaks only in vague terms about how "we" decided to "destroy towers in America." Furthermore it did not appear until October 2004, more than three years after the event; this suggests that the video served some other purpose than as a true confession.

So the war rolls on. Bin Laden is now a mere phantom, a token excuse for continuing the conflict. If he really was our target, surely we would have found him by now. A former member of the Russian military told me not long ago that, shortly after the original bounty was announced, the Russian secret services offered to deliver bin Laden to the Americans within a week if they could claim the prize. Washington declined. Some people believe that bin Laden is in fact long dead, either of illness or some unspecified U.S. attack. But as long his name remains useful for the war cause, we can be sure he will live on — if only in the imaginations of our so-called "intelligence" community.

Meanwhile, "the Taliban have gained the upper hand," reports the Wall Street Journal. General Stanley McChrystal warns that "U.S. casualties…will remain high for months to come." Our "anti-war" president Obama has more than doubled troop levels since taking office, from 30,000 to 65,000; we will be at 68,000 by year's end, and there is a pending request for 10,000 more. To date we have spent almost $200 billion on this war, and current costs, as reported by the Journal, are running at $1 billion per week. To put this in perspective, $1 billion could provide all 100,000 Michigan college students with $10,000 in tuition assistance. It could provide a quarter million people with full health care coverage for a year. Or it can keep 65,000 troops in tanks and bullets for one more week.

Unlike Iraq, there is no end in sight. The American public senses this, and as a result, opposition is rapidly growing. The percentage opposing the Afghan war increased from 48% in May to 54% in the latest polls. Strikingly, a full 75% of Democrats now oppose this war. Normally this should matter to a Democratically- controlled House, Senate, and White House. But Obama and Congress are entirely unconcerned. Obama is committed to an indefinite military intervention. We will be killing people in Afghanistan, and getting soldiers killed, for years to come. Our favorite puppet leader, Hamid Karzai, is firmly in place (I am not being facetious; he has explicitly admitted as much!). Any pretense to democracy there is a sham. And for what? Is it really to get bin Laden, or to stop petty drug dealers, or to bring "freedom" to the Afghan people, as "Operation Enduring Freedom" would suggest?

Whom do the Taliban and al Qaeda really threaten? Yes, they hate America, but this is for three understandable reasons: (1) U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and other Mideast nations, (2) the American push for UN and coalition actions against Arabs and Muslims (as in the brutal eight-year sanction of Iraq during the Clinton years), and (3) our unquestioned support—economic, military, and diplomatic—for Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, Lebanese, and others. For these we are rightly hated. We also prop up compliant governments not only in Afghanistan, but also in the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan, and hence they are hated as well—and rightly so. But "hated" is not "threatened, " at least in any meaningful sense. They pose no substantial threat to the U.S. The ones to be worried are the corrupt puppet leaders around the Mideast, and the militant Zionists in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

And lest someone raise another popular red herring, our need to intervene in the Middle East does not stem from our dependency on oil. Every oil-producing nation wants to sell its oil as quickly as possible. The global market makes the threat of embargos remote. The American oil lobby has never pushed for military intervention. In "The Israel Lobby," Mearsheimer and Walt observed that the idea of a "war for oil" is both illogical and contradicted by empirical data: "there is little direct evidence to support this claim and considerable evidence that casts doubt upon it." And all this has no bearing whatsoever on Afghanistan, which has precisely zero proven oil reserves.

So, why are we in Afghanistan? In sum, the situation is this: By 2001 we were frustrated by an unsuccessful 10-year effort to remove Saddam Hussein. The Second Palestinian Intifada had begun a year earlier, in September 2000, and over 40 Israeli citizens were killed in the months leading up to 9/11. The Israel Lobby kicked into high gear, agitating for war against Iraq, Syria, Iran, Hizbullah, the Taliban—anyone who might support resistance actions and oppose Zionist expansionism. And then the final straw: an attack by 19 hijackers—none of whom were Afghans—who were loosely connected to al Qaeda and bin Laden, who was in turn loosely connected to the Taliban government in Afghanistan. That's good enough for us, said Bush and Cheney; let the missiles fly.

The most likely explanation, then, is a combination of two primary factors: an urgent Israeli need for action against terrorist attacks, and a powerful U.S. military looking for an enemy. We needed an excuse, and 9/11 was terribly convenient. I won't go into the various theories about how we or the Mossad may have been implicated in 9/11 (I would refer the reader to a recent authoritative work like David Ray Griffin's excellent "Debunking 9/11 Debunking.") Whatever the cause, it was, indeed, a fortuitously timed event for those pressing for war against Arabs and Muslims. With 9/11 all the pieces came together: an attack on U.S. soil, a shadowy enemy in al Qaeda and radical Islam, an illegitimate U.S. presidency looking for justification, and a U.S. military itching for action. Everything was ready to go—hence the reason why we were able to finger bin Laden and the Taliban within 30 minutes of the first plane crash.

American involvement in World War II lasted a mere 3½ years. In that time we defeated the combined efforts of the evil Nazi death machine, Italian fascism, and Japanese totalitarianism. In Afghanistan, after 8 years of trying, we cannot defeat a loose network of ancient tribesmen, goat herders, and subsistence farmers—whose primary concerns are neighboring warlords and where to find their next meal. Something clearly does not add up. Evidently we are not there to defeat them—strictly speaking, this is impossible—but simply to fight them, to maintain a military presence, to kill Arabs and Muslims, and ultimately, to make the Middle East safe for Israel. No other rationale makes sense.

But no one talks about all this, thanks to the Israel Lobby's unquestioned influence over mass media and government. We have been collectively lobotomized by the Lobby. We are virtually brain-dead when it comes to asking basic questions, and demanding rational answers. Any brain-dead social body can persist on life support for a period of time, but its days are surely numbered. Financial collapse is a sign that our vital organs are shutting down. Unless we are able to rouse ourselves from our comatose state, America is not long for this world.

Dr. David Skrbina is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

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