“FINANCIAL

REALPOLITIK”

In the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, who and how benefited from the war in Afghanistan?

By Dany Smith

The experience of Afghanistan is a demonstration of how the border of political power and international legality is crossed to achieve unilateral geopolitical objectives. What happened last August 15 reflects not only the military and political failure of another powerful invader but also the dark background that dragged the US and its Atlantic partners into a situation that still has no clear resolution.

The flight that could be seen in the media was the end, the death of a geopolitical process led by Washington and supported by its NATO allies that buried the hegemonist expectations of the United States that were sealed with the words of President Joe Biden himself who saying “Our mission in Afghanistan was never aimed at building a nation. He never aimed to create a unified and centralized democracy”. He put a political epitaph on the already peeling image and political credibility of American democracy.

With this, it is clear that Washington is neglecting what in the last twenty years it had argued to support the invasion in 2001 and that later it continued to be sustained with the administration of Barak Obama in which Biden was an official. Trump denounced these inconsistencies and the futility of this war, focusing on the unacceptable economic costs, claiming that it was a bottomless hole for the treasury's finances. Certainly Trump was telling the truth and the proof of this is the 85,000 million dollars invested in assembling and equipping a paper army. Biden tried to detach himself from both extremes and chose to go off on a tangent by making a reckless decision (although not a rash one) that undoubtedly hides a trap.

Now in light of this US speech, it is clear to the whole world that Washington never sought freedom and democracy for Afghans, something that in the face of the facts (and as was also evidenced in Iraq) was quite little credible due to the visible consequences they caused on humanity (not excluding women) from Afghans.

Was the US seeking to win this war? Although the question seems puzzling and even illogical, it is important to answer to explain what has been pursued in this occupation. This forces us to ask another question and she is Why is a war unleashed? As Carl Von Clausewitz said “War is not simply a political act, but a true political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a management of them by other means.” Pentagon strategists may have considered this classic definition at the time, but most likely politicians in Washington did not. In a sense they did not need to consider it since this German author's conception of war was already non-existent and anachronistic. That concept was adapted to the needs of the realpolitik conceived by the advisers of the second half of the 20th century such as Henry Kissinger and George Kennan and much less for sinister minds of the circle of the Republican administration of Bush-Cheney such as those of the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the entire circle of schemers of American neoconservatism and Zionism.

Considering these actors and the real objectives pursued by the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the answer has a variety of nuances but that can be encompassed in a single definition: Profits in chaos. Here in the US no one can be surprised by this answer since the evidence of what it financially represented for a handful of political gangsters -including contractor companies-, the Pentagon and the CIA with their inevitable derivations to Wall Street, leaves far below the tearful propaganda that today from the media tries to move public opinion by an imposition of concern for the freedom of Afghan women.

And it is that when did they say something about those same women who were murdered or raped by members of the ISAF or their henchmen of the "Afghan Special Groups"? Unless your concern only goes through a group of those women, those who voluntarily were part of the apparatus and benefited from the collaborationist system. It is known that in the same American embassy in Kabul and in the Bagram military complex, a few nights before the fall, the Americans had large sex and drug orgies in which prostitutes and members of local LGTB groups participated that -and it is worth the It is worth underlining- they are financially and politically supported by the US as a cultural disintegration tactic in the Islamic world (part of the Transhumanist Globalist plan of Biden and Harris).

It is not only a question of mere accommodating hypocrisy, but also of cooperating with the desperate efforts of the US State Department not to lose the little trust that remains in its collaborators who are still trapped in Kabul. So blatant is the propaganda that even when the Taliban was a proven creature of the CIA, the Anglo-Saxon media tries to dissociate the comparisons that have been made of the flight from Afghanistan with the analogy to South Vietnam in 1975 with questions such as How can Are you comparing the two situations? As some articles in the neo-conservative “Think Tanks” admonish, trying to make the reader believe that in addition to being wrong, the North Vietnamese were not as bad as the Taliban.

Precisely these Think Tanks and the media conglomerate are making an effort to wash the face of this political and military catastrophe to Washington's ambitions.

This failure in turn has revealed an internal tugging between the CIA and the Department of Defense that is as or more damaging than the Taliban. Look if not, how for two decades Washington and the Western media have tried to convince public opinion that "Islamist terrorism" was the cause of all the misfortunes in America and the world, but shortly after walking down that path, they began to notice the dirty folds of American politics. There is still nothing clear in the days of 9/11, despite the fact that at all times from the power and through the media the story is retouched trying to patch up the incongruities of the official account.

Unexpectedly, that served to reveal the true face of American democracy and its interrelationship with other partners in the design and construction of transnational enemies such as "Al Qaeda" and "Islamic State" that would fulfill a long-term strategic purpose in planning that " New American Century ”and that was, to install perpetual chaos in the Middle East and Central Asia that would also benefit the state of Israel.

So who created and fed the terrorists or the "moderate rebels"? When the Department of Defense did not approve an arms consignment or the assistance of personnel for training clandestine groups, the CIA was there to cover the requirement. When something was too dirty for the politicians in the White House, there were guys like Tenet, Brenan or Mrs. Haspel who with that proven and particular contempt for Muslims, would not hesitate to carry out the orders entrusted to them.

What we saw in Afghanistan, those thousands of tanks and weapons "abandoned" at the bases and airfields for the Taliban to seize, was already seen in Iraq in 2014 without the Iraqis realizing that this was part of a larger hoax. On both sides, these intelligence agencies of the same US state competed to see who was better at their tasks while the Iraqis and Afghans brought the blood.

In the shadow of this, the invaders gave birth to a new caste that today we know as the "collaborationists" who live in opulence and under the tutelage of the invader until he is expelled or flees as happened with the servants of the capital. These are the same ones we saw running after US planes in August to flee Kabul. But the most interesting members of this infamous caste are the politicians who like Jamil Karsai and his lieutenants laid a red carpet for the occupiers while the CIA and its Drones massacred civilian settlers in remote northern villages or a few kilometers from Kabul, tortured The prisoners.

Of course, the silence and cooperation of characters like Karsai and Ghani earned him the reward of a comfortable life free from the controls of a law that was dictated by the occupant. From there on, bribery and corruption reigned in all the institutions set up by Anglo-Americans. In this universe of corruption and money with no known origin, local and US political and military officials benefited who, taking advantage of the circumstances, turned the war into a profitable business.

The case of Generals Standley Mc Chrystal and Mike Flynt is one of them. Mc Chrystal after being fired, after amassing a fortune difficult to explain with a salary as a public servant, jumped into business life contributing his military knowledge for private corporations. Then his pupil, General Flynt as head of counterterrorism (Delta Force and Seals) for Afghanistan and Iraq in the Obama era - whom he personally despised - and sheltered by Donald Trump, put into practice his recalcitrant Islamophobia on the humanity of Muslims with the heinous consequences very well documented. Along with these dirty tasks, he would have enriched himself so treacherously that, after the bank where he maintains his accounts and credit cards was made public, he decided to suspend them. It is assumed that part of that money came from the funds destined for the reconstruction of the country which, as also happened in Iraq, were never invested for those purposes and ended up in the hands of corrupt civilian and military officials.

On the other hand, that would not be the only source of the funds that enriched the former general since it is well known that the momentum of these wars moved and continues to move flows of black money from arms trafficking, drugs and all kinds of merchandise for smuggling. Within this dirty scheme, the equipment and weapons that the US and other European countries provided to the police and the regular Afghan army were involved, which later, due to the mysteries of life, ended up in the hands of the Taliban or other groups. Managing black money funds is one of the prerogatives of this murky universe. This is where military intelligence and their CIA civilian colleagues meet.

As you can see, morale does not exist in the usual display of these actors and their Afghan collaborators were not going to be better. It was for this reason that when the US announced its withdrawal, the Afghan regular army was rapidly disbanding. In addition to not being made up of the supposed 300,000 men who appeared on the payroll (only half were real), the troops of the collaborationist army did not have the spirit or the moral to face an adversary highly motivated and convinced of their objectives. Where did millions of dollars go, the equipment and weapons for those ghost soldiers? To the pockets of collaborationist commanders and political officials.

But Afghan officials weren't the only ones benefiting from this futile war. As in Iraq, the Pentagon and other US agencies were implicated in lavish scams. The cases of retired general Joseph F. Dunford Jr and retired general John R. Allen are another example of how, after leaving public service, state officials were absorbed by private arms companies such as “Gruman”, “Lockeed Martin Co” and others that closed bulky defense contracts to supply the troops deployed in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In light of these antecedents, we can conclude that what prevails in this warmongering adventure is a nihilistic realism or rather, a stark and racist realism aimed at obtaining (apart from geopolitical objectives) in each stratum of those involved (government, companies and agencies) , economic gains according to their positions in power.