“Like Great Britain before it, Washington’s interactions with Afghanistan exhibited an ignorance of Afghanistan’s historical desire for non-alignment. This ignorance was combined with an insistence that any expression of that desire proved that Moscow was influencing Kabul’s politics. Fitzgerald and Gould write that this was not an accident. In fact, it was the logical outcome of a 1950 national security directive known as NSC 68.”
“The direct result of this directive was the creation of a permanent war economy and the creation of a national security state. In practice, some of what this meant was that national liberation struggles and national desires for non-alignment were perceived to be Soviet-inspired and therefore part of the enemy camp.”
The Arrogance of Empire, Detailed
by Ron Jacobs / January 16th, 2010
In the first week of 2010, five US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. The last week of 2009 saw the deaths of eight CIA agents there. Several more Afghan civilians were killed during this period, including the apparent executions of several young boys by persons either in the US military or working with them. In addition, insurgent forces targeted a Karzai government in official in eastern Khost and launched rockets at the site of a future US consulate in Herat. It was reported on January 6, 2010 that the Obama administration was sending 1,000 more US civilian experts to the country to help in so-called reconstruction projects. This news was greeted with skepticism from Afghans both in and out of the government. The Afghan ambassador to the United Nations noted that few Afghans trusted these so-called reconstruction endeavors and that the US might do better if they hired Afghans to do the rebuilding instead of shipping in US citizens to “create parallel structures that would ruin (the Afghan government’s) efforts.” The ambassador must be quite aware that the history of US reconstruction in either Afghanistan or Iraqis is a legacy of corruption, poor construction, and failed endeavors that benefited no one but the foreign companies that garnered the contracts. Read more…