Norris McDonald | America’s Afghan War: ‘Big man’ profits, poor people suffer!

Afghanistan is now ranked as a backward country, at a point of “low development”, by the United Nations. This is a terrible human tragedy of wasted lives and years in the face of 20 years of American and Western occupation.

America spent $300 million a day on the Afghan war over the 20 years, amounting to US$2.26 trillion, and yet, despite all the talk about ‘nation-building’, over 75 per cent of Afghans live in the rural areas, but only nine per cent have access to electricity, the Asia Development Bank (ADB) says.

Overall, only 30 per cent of all Afghans are connected to the electrical grid, therefore America’s nation-building project was never, ever a modernisation project.

How then was this Afghan war a moral, nation-building, ‘civilizing quest’, if after 20 years of American and Western occupation, the Afghan people have been left so far behind the rest of the world in terms of improvement in their everyday standard of living?

No one should be surprised, then, that the Taliban was able to march into Kabul, the capital, in one day as Americans and their allies flee for their lives.

Clearly, it has been 20 miserable years of suffering for the ordinary Afghan people.

HUMILIATING END TO US PERPETUAL WAR

America has ended “an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” President Joe Biden has said, as he made a brutal decision to leave Afghanistan.

This brings an abrupt, humiliating, miserable end to a 20-year occupation of that country.

Changing world dynamics have been a critical element driving America’s hegemonic world strategy over the last 50 years. But now, with their ignoble retreat, America’s empire-building plans appear to be in a grave moral crisis.

Driven by people like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Condoleezza Rice and other acolytes of America’s global domination, the upswing of modern Pax Americana came in response to the clamouring of the poor nations for economic and social justice, under a ‘New World International Economic Order’.

They got a new world order, indeed!

One of a more militant and brutal American imperialism supported by her quisling European allies.

Instead of political bargaining, the poorer countries demand for justice was met with a brutal, nail-fisted approach.

Wars, coups, political and military interventions, threats, economic sanctions and political blackmail have been the dominant elements driving American foreign policy over the last few decades.

The 20-year Afghan war was part of this hegemonic pattern and practice that saw brutal overthrow of governments in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Now, after spending $300 million a day on the Afghan War, over 20 years, amounting to US$2.26 trillion, America is forced to leave in humiliation.

LITHIUM AND OTHER STRATEGIC MINERALS

With the collapse of the American and Western occupation, and the disintegration of their proxy regime, the Afghan Taliban now control one of the world’s biggest lithium deposits and the world’s largest-known, untapped copper deposits.

Afghanistan has one of the largest untapped copper deposits in the world. A Chinese company has a contract signed in 2007 but, because of the war, was unable to reap this financial benefit.

It also has other strategic minerals, such as uranium, gold, silver, zinc, mercury, platinum, iron, lithium – all forms of rare earth minerals – emeralds, sapphires, rubies, turquoise, and aluminum that a US geological survey estimates is worth between US$1 and $3 trillion.

Afghanistan has been a country long ravaged by wars. From Soviet Russian warmongering in Afghanistan in 1979 up to now, it has been years of inhumane suffering for the Afghan people.

Thousands of villages have been destroyed and millions of people, including little children, maimed and killed.

The true picture of the Afghanistan war has long been hidden from the American and Western public.

PERPETUAL WARS, ‘BIG MAN’ PROFITS

An August 2021 report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) did not give the expected true picture, in my opinion, of the humanitarian costs of the Afghan war.

The SIGAR report reminded US congressional leaders that America had planned to withdraw her troops in 2004. But it never said why America stayed longer than planned. Neither did it examine war profiteering which, no doubt, bloated the true cost of the Afghan war.

Military war profiteers Raytheon, Boeing, BAE Systems, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin are among the top five political campaign donors who contributed roughly US$46 million to American top politicians.

Raytheon Corporation, for example, which makes missiles, achieved “more than 90 per cent of its profits from military contracts”.

Raytheon achieved a whopping “51.66 per cent increase” in revenue and, by this rule, an astronomical rise in profits, when compared to previous years. Its total revenue was US$62.3 billion for the 12 months ending June 30, 2021.

POLITICAL LESSONS

The Afghan debacle shows that America and Europe are now reaping the maelstrom of their own hegemonic tendencies, which was in the upswing from the mid-1970s, and now, in my opinion, has had the air popped out of their global ego-centrism.

One lesson of the Afghan and Iraq wars is that it is not enough to have technological and military superiority, if you cannot win the hearts and minds of the people you conquer.

Another important lesson was that America and her European allies engaged in a 20-year clash of culture, religion and civilization, between the East and the West, without fully understanding norms and religious values and culture of the people they were fighting.

After millions of tons of rockets and bombs; a wasted U$2.26 trillion; people killed and wounded on both sides of this conflict; and a devastation of basic life of the Afghan people, all America has to show for it is public humiliation.

My dear friends, Afghanistan has long been regarded as the graveyard where empires – from Alexander the Great until now – go to die!

With the humiliating defeat of America and her Western allies, this saying appears to be true.

That is just ‘the bitta truth’!

Norris McDonald is a respiratory therapist, social researcher, and political analyst. Email feedback columns@gleanerjm.com and miaminorris@yahoo.com.