Who does get killed? Are these people Taliban people or Al Qaeda or random civilians who had nothing to do with it? It would be naive to believe the propaganda that says that firing these fantastic weapons is killing the right people. Clive Stafford-Smith, director Reprieve
What really crippled us in the end in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the Iraqi and the Afghani population ... didn’t consent in its support. Rory Stewart MP, author Can Intervention Work?
He [Brown] sat in the sofa-cabinet with his predecessor as genocidal wars in Afghanistan and then on Iraq were unleashed. Like Blair and the others in that Downing Street lounge, he is a psychopath too. Not one of his successive pretexts for laying upon Iraq like wolves could justify the killing that would maim even one family. David Halpin, Alternative View II conference 31st May 2009, ‘The Vortex Sucks Ever Louder’
America went to war against Iraq based on a lie. We were told in 2002 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – the previous administration even pursued torture to try to extract false confessions to try to justify the war. It’s time to tell the truth. The truth is we should not have prosecuted a war against Iraqi people. The truth is the Democratic Senate could have stopped the Iraq War in 2002 ... Get out of Iraq! Get out of Afghanistan! Come home, America! Come home! Dennis Kucinich, address to Congress 14th May 2009
The US air strikes against Taliban military targets entailed an undetermined number of civilian casualties, at least some of which resulted from mis-targeting. The air strikes also contributed to the humanitarian crisis, with thousands of Afghans fleeing their homes. Their flight swelled the ranks of hundreds of thousands who were already internally displaced because of drought, war, and conflict-related violence. Human Rights Watch World Report 2002: Afghanistan
In Afghanistan US troops have unleashed a new kind of war: the capture or kill the Taliban’s commanders. It’s a campaign that uses soldiers, special forces, spies and America’s most powerful technologies. Dispatches: America’s Secret Killers, Channel 4 2011
It was a military assassination based on secret intelligence. Targeting killing has become a defining tactic of the conflict in Afghanistan. ibid.
Over the last year there have been more than twelve thousands raids across the country. ibid.
Petraeus has doubled the number of kill-capture missions. ibid.
Kill-Capture operations like this are a gamble. ibid.
This operation seemed to do more harm than good. ibid.
August in Kabul and the airport’s in chaos. The Taliban have taken the Afghan capital. US and British soldiers still control the airport, helping thousands of Afghans to leave. Dispatches: Escape from the Taliban, Channel 4 2021
Back in the ’90s they introduced a harsh interpretation of Sharia Law that included brutal punishments and executions. ibid.
On July 3rd 1979 the CIA gave birth to Islamic fundamentalism when President Carter signed a Directive for United States’ Intelligence to provide radical Islamic thinking, and arms to Afghan fighters, before the Soviet Union invaded. Who Killed John O’Neill?
Maverick counter-intelligence expert in the FBI, O’Neill tracked Osama bin Laden since 1995. He knew more about Osama than anyone else in the world. He tracked him past the Embassy bombings in 1998 ... His investigations into terrorism were blocked from up on high. Blocked by whom? In December of 2001 he resigned as Deputy Director of the FBI. At the same time he was publicly opposed to the anti-terrorism policies of President George W Bush. On September 10th he started his new job, with a company called Kroll Associates, as head of security at the World Trade Centre. A day later he was dead. A victim of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Come on! ibid.
Afghanistan: But what was the fight really all about? Not carrots or potatoes. It was poppies. Endless fields of opium poppies that provide over 70% of the world’s heroin supply to addicts worldwide. Ring of Power, 2008
The British forces drug addiction onto an entire nation [China], stole Hong Kong, and made Hong Kong the capital of the British international drug trade. ibid.
In a meeting held on October 4th 1997 at Unocal headquarters American oilmen made a proposal to the Taliban about building a pipeline through Afghanistan. Rothschild’s Shell Oil and Rockefeller’s Exxon Oil had invested billions in the Kazakhstan oil and gas reserves just north of Afghanistan. Now they need a pipeline to transport it to the Persian Gulf. ibid.
George Bush junior [W] attacked the poverty striken, war ravaged country of Afghanistan only four weeks after 9/11. ibid.
There can never be peace and democracy in Afghanistan. Why? Because peace and democracy would expose and cut off corporate America’s opium and heroin trade at the source. So what was the payoff for the US/British war on Afghanistan? 1) The uncooperative Taliban warlords got kicked out and replaced by the cooperative Northern Alliance warlords; 2) Opium and heroin productions and revenues sky-rocketed; 3) Afghanistan got a new leader named Hamid Karzai who just happens to be an ex-employee of Unocal Oil. ibid.
Afghan war plans were on Bush’s desk on 09/09/01. MSNBC
After the bloodiest battle of the entire Afghan war 8,000 Taliban soldiers surrendered to the North Alliance & US Special Forces under guarantee that their lives would be spared. Today up to 3,000 of those men lie in a unmarked desert grave. And American soldiers stand accused by numerous eye witnesses of their disappearance ... They were massacred by America’s closest allies: but what was the role of US soldiers themselves in this massacre? Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death, 2002
But what they did was slow and small. They put only 11,000 troops into Afghanistan. There are more police here in Manhattan. Richard Clarke, television interview
They wanted to protect the building of the gas pipeline. Annie Machon, interview 30th April 2010, former MI5 officer
Afghan Pipeline Vital To ‘One of the Great Prizes of the 21st Century’. ibid. Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline 2004
US Military Bases Line Afghan Pipeline Route. ibid.
Afghan pipeline given go-ahead. BBC online headline 30th May 2002
I’ve spent much of my life in places of upheaval but I’ve rarely seen such a bombed and blasted and ruined city as Kabul. Most of the damage was done not by the Taliban, but by the Afghan warlords backed and trained and funded by America for more than 20 years. The same warlords that have been effectively put back in power by George Bush. John Pilger, Breaking the Silence, ITV 2003
However welcome the scenes of people playing music and shaving off their beards, this so-called Northern Alliance are no bringers of freedom. They are the same people welcomed by similar scenes of jubilation in 1992, who then killed an estimated 50,000 in four years of internecine feuding.
The new heroes so far have tortured and executed at least 100 prisoners of war, and countless others, as well as looted food supplies and re-established their monopoly on the heroin trade.
This week, Amnesty International made an unusually blunt statement that was buried in the news. It ought to be emblazoned across every front page and television screen. ‘By failing to appreciate the gravity of the human rights concerns in relation to Northern Alliance leaders’, said Amnesty, ‘UK ministers at best perpetuate a culture of impunity for past crimes; at worst they risk being complicit in human rights abuse’.
The truth is that the latest crop of criminals to ‘liberate’ Kabul have been given a second chance by the most powerful country on earth pounding into dust one of the poorest, where people’s life expectancy is just over 40.
And for what?
Not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has yet to be caught or killed.
Osama bin Laden and his network have almost certainly slipped into the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier of Pakistan. Will Pakistan now be bombed? And Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, where Islamic extremism and its military network took root? Of course not.
The Saudi sheikhs, many of them as extreme as the Taliban, control America's greatest source of oil. The Egyptian regime, bribed with billions of US dollars, is an important American proxy. No daisy cutters for them.
There was, and still is, no ‘war on terrorism’. Instead, we have watched a variation of the great imperial game of swapping ‘bad’ terrorists for ‘good’ terrorists, while untold numbers of innocent people have paid with their lives: most of one village, whole families, a hospital, as well as teenage conscripts suitably dehumanised by the word ‘Taliban’.
It is perfectly understandable that those in the West who supported this latest American tenor from the air, or hedged their bets, should now seek to cover the blood on their reputations with absurd claims that ‘bombing works’. Tell that to grieving parents at fresh graves in impoverished places of whom the sofa bomb-aimers know nothing.
The contortion of intellect and morality that this triumphalism requires is not a new phenomenon. Putting aside the terminally naive, it mostly comes from those who like to play at war: who have seen nothing of bombing, as I have experienced it: cluster bombs, daisy cutters: the lot.
How appropriate that the last American missile to hit Kabul before the ‘liberators’ arrived should destroy the satellite transmitter of the Al-Jazeera television station, virtually the only reliable source of news in the region.
For weeks, American officials have been pressuring the government of Qatar, the Gulf state where Al-Jazeera is based, to silence its broadcasters, who have given a view of the ‘war against terrorism’ other than that based on the false premises of the Bush and Blair ‘crusade’.
The guilty secret is that the attack on Afghanistan was unnecessary. The ‘smoking gun’ of this entire episode is evidence of the British Government’s lies about the basis for the war.