Nederland en Afghanistan 95

Het is geen politiek vraagstuk in Nederland, de oorlog die Nederland voert in Afghanistan, die volgens de commerciele media honderden doden veroorzaakt, vooral onder de Afghanen. Het is een uitzichtloze oorlog, waarvoor geen geldige rechtvaardiging bestaat en waarvoor het kabinet Balkenende geen verantwoordiging tegenover het parlement hoeft af te leggen. Terwijl toch de voormalige wethouder van Borculo en tegenwoordig minister van Defensie, Henk Kamp, meermaals niet de waarheid heeft verteld over die oorlog. Feit is dat Nederland die oorlog voert in opdracht van Washington. Tot straks hier of daar door 'robuust' optreden van Afghaanse strijders onder Nederlanders doden vallen, kan dit kabinet zijn oorlogsmissie ongestoord voortzetten. Voor alle duidelijkheid is hier een overzicht van die mislukte oorlog.

Information Clearing House bericht:

'Afghanistan: The Other Lost War By Stephen Lendman.

In his important new book Freedom Next Time , dealing with "empire, its facades and the enduring struggle of people for their freedom," John Pilger has a chapter on Afghanistan. In it he says that "Through all the humanitarian crises in living memory, no country has been abused and suffered more, and none has been helped less than Afghanistan." He goes on to describe what he sees as something more like a moonscape than a functioning nation. In the capitol, Kabul, there are "contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue....(with) no light or heat." It seems like it's always been that way for these beleaguered people who've had a long history of conflict and suffering with little relief.

In the 19th century, the Afghan people were victimized by the "Great Game" struggle pitting the British empire against Tsarist Russia for control of that part of the world. More recently in the 1980s, it paid dearly again when a US recruited mujahideen guerrilla army battled against a Soviet occupation. It forced the occupiers out but at the cost of a ravaged country and one forced to endure still more suffering and destruction from the brutal civil war in the 1990s that followed the Soviet withdrawal. Then came 9/11, the US attack, invasion, occupation and further devastation that's ongoing with no end in sight and now intensifying in ferocity. In his book, Pilger explains that Afghanistan today is what the CIA once called Vietnam - "the grand illusion of the American cause." There's no assured safety even in most parts of the capitol now where for a brief time after the US invasion the people of Kabul enjoyed a degree of freedom long denied them by the Taliban. Now there's neither freedom nor safety almost anywhere in the country as the brutal regional "warlords" rule most parts of it, and the Taliban have begun a resurgence reigniting the conflict that for a time subsided. Today the nation is once again a war zone and narco-state with the "warlords" and drug kingpins controlling everything outside the capitol and the Taliban gaining strength and fighting back in the south trying to regain what they lost. In Kabul itself, the country's selected and nominal president Hamid Karzai (a former CIA asset and chief consultant to US oil giant UNOCAL) is a caricature of a man and willing US stooge who functions as little more than the mayor of the city. Outside the capitol he has no mandate or support and wouldn't last a day on his own without the round the clock protection afforded him by the US military and the private contractor DynCorp. When they ruled most of the country in the 1990s, the Taliban at least kept order and wouldn't tolerate banditry, rape or murder, despite their ultra-puritanical ways and harsh treatment of the disobedient. They also virtually ended opium production. Now all that's changed. The US - British invasion in 2001 ended the ban on opium production, allowed the "warlords" to replant as much of it as they wanted, and the result according to a report released by the UN is that cultivation of this crop is spiraling out of control. Antonio Maria Costa, the UN anti-drug chief, said this year's opium harvest will be a record 6,100 tons (enough to make 610 tons of heroin) or 92% of the total world supply and 30% more than the amount consumed globally. Costa went much further in his comments saying southern Afghanistan "display(s) the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking, insurgency and terrorism, crime and corruption (because) opium cultivation is out of control." He directed his comments at President Karzai for not acting forcefully to deal with the problem saying provincial governors and police chiefs should be sacked and held to account. He also accused government administrators of corruption.

The reason why this is happening is that elicit drug trafficking is big business with an annual UN estimate gross of around $400 - 500 billion or double the sales revenue from legal prescription drugs the US pharmaceutical giants reported in 2005. Those profiting from it include more than the "kingpins" and organized crime. The elicit trade has long been an important profit center for many US and other banks including the giant international money center ones. It's also well-documented that the CIA has been involved in drug-trafficking (directly or indirectly) throughout its half century existence and especially since the 1980s and the Contra wars in Nicaragua. Today the CIA is partnered with the Afghan "warlords" and criminal syndicates in the huge business of trafficking heroin. It guarantees the crime bosses easy access to the lucrative US market and the CIA a large and reliable revenue stream to augment its annual (heretofore secret) budget disclosed by Mary Margaret Graham, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection, to be $44 billion in 2005.

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