(Photo by Marcus Yam / LA Times)
Dear Friend,
As U.S. forces were preparing to
evacuate Afghanistan after 20 years of war, the Pentagon conducted a
deadly drone strike in a residential area in Kabul that killed all 9
members of a family who lived next door to the target.
This final act, and perhaps it will
not be the last bombing, is emblematic of what the U.S. war in
Afghanistan has meant for the people of that country. Over 250,000
Afghans have died, including 71,000 civilians, since the U.S. invaded
the country on October 7, 2001.
The people of Afghanistan had nothing
to do with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack against the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, but they have paid a heavy price. So
too have the thousands of young U.S. military personnel who were
killed or wounded in this senseless war.
The 20-year long Pentagon operation
is presented to the people of the United States as a noble cause that
at some point went off the rails. Initially justified as an effort to
destroy Al Qaeda, the occupation of Afghanistan was presented as an
effort to protect the rights for girls and women.
As in Vietnam, the people of the
United States were lied to by the government about the war—the causes
and motivations for the war and how it was conducted. For 20 years,
the people of the United States were told that there was a hopeful
light at the end of this tunnel. But the generals and politicians knew
otherwise. They knew there was no such thing as "winning". But they
concealed the truth from the public.
This was not a benign or humane
occupation. In December 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence released a scathing 6,700 page report documenting how the
CIA and the Pentagon had engaged in a massive torture program against
people who were arrested or kidnapped. Using the euphemism of
“enhanced interrogation techniques”, the CIA and the Pentagon engaged
in a program of systematic torture of thousands of people held at
Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and in other Secret prison sites, and at
Guantanamo. Torture methods included beating, binding, in concerted
stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep
disruption, sleep deprivation, to the point of hallucination, the
denial of food, drink, or medical care for wounds, as well as water
boarding, walling, sexual humiliation, subjection to extreme heat or
extreme cold, and confinement to small coffin-like boxes (report by
the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, December
2014).
The United States has frozen all of
Afghanistan’s assets in an effort designed to impose collective
punishment on the people as retaliation for the U.S. defeat in this
20-year long debacle. The ANSWER Coalition, which has opposed the war
since its onset, demands that the United States government unfreeze
all of Afghanistan’s assets and that the U.S. pay reparations to the
people of Afghanistan for the death and destruction caused by this
20-year long imperial adventure.
Brian Becker National Director, ANSWER Coalition
More analysis on
Afghanistan:
- ANSWER Coalition's National
Director, Brian Becker, interviews Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army
colonel and U.S. State Department official in Afghanistan. Click here to listen to the
interview
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