| From Unity, 7 August 2010 |
Wikileaks and the Afghan slaughterby John MalloyA bright light has been shone on the ongoing imperialist war crime in Afghanistan this week by the co-ordinated sharing of thousands of internal security and intelligence reports of the coalition forces’ activities in Afghanistan. These were released by the Wikileaks web site (http://wikileaks.org) to the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and the New York Times.These documents, which consist of over 90,000 records, outline military activity in Afghanistan from January 2004 until December 2009 and expose our embedded mainstream media’s coverage of this conflict as a continuous military apologist lie. It is scarcely possible to watch any news bulletin these days without seeing a propaganda piece where those who don a military uniform are immediately “heroes,” irrespective of their mission. If such “heroism” ends in military death, more subtly and most nauseatingly the media change their tone from strident to maudlin hypocrisy, covering funerals in a manner that attempts to be both anti-establishment (in their lachrymose “lions led by donkeys,” “why are the politicians sending our boys there?”) and patriotic, in the vow that these heroes’ colleagues will of course keep doing their “duty.” There’s no space, of course, for the Afghan civilian dead—estimated by the UN in 2001 at 10,000 and now, it is suggested, three times that number. This, of course, is the same casualness in relation to civilian death that was summed up by US general Tommy Franks in relation to the Iraq invasion: “We don’t do body counts.” Incredibly, this story has provoked greater media debate on the rights and wrongs of the leaks than on the slaughter it chronicles. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange rightly stated, however, that the leaks revealed “the true nature of this war.” This picture is far from former Defence Secretary Des Browne’s description of the Afghan war as the “most noble cause of the 21st century.” In fact, as the Morning Star summarised, the leaks highlight “the stark reality of poor people in a very poor country being harassed, imprisoned and bombed by very well-equipped high-tech forces who at the click of a button can order an unmanned drone aircraft to bomb a particular target with Hellfire missiles. No pilot is involved and there’s no risk to those who command the operation, as the US army officer inputs the information on a data screen in a bunker in the US Midwest.” While the initial propaganda stated that the original mission in Afghanistan in 2001 was to capture the CIA’s former agent Osama Bin Laden, it is clear—with £9 billion spent, no Bin Laden in sight, and 3,420 reported attacks on coalition forces in the last year alone—that the “official” mission is a complete failure. The true mission, however, remains. It is to ensure imperialist access to new oil and gas reserves in Central Asia. As Michael Parenti writes, “US companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. The route favoured by Unocal, a US based Oil Company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean . . . Well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to . . . create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and . . . allies into supporting military intervention.” |
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