[lbo-talk] The Afghan War as a "Loss Leader"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Jul 1 16:08:02 PDT 2005



>[lbo-talk] The Afghan War as a "Loss Leader"
>Jim Devine jdevine03 at gmail.com
>Fri Jul 1 13:57:11 PDT 2005
<snip>
>As Chris notes, Yoshie leaves out the foreign support for the US
>invasion of Afghanistan in her story, it's true. But the US motives
>do include the fact that it was an easy target and strategically
>important (oil, etc.)
<snip>
>The US role meant that it was the leader of the invasion -- and that
>it was US goals which were most served by that invasion and the
>resulting occupation.

Moscow, New Delhi, Teheran, etc. were concerned about the Taliban, but their concern wasn't strong enough to compel them to invade on their own, without US troops. Even now, it is not Afghanistan's neighbors but Washington and other NATO powers that have troops there.

It's possible (though highly unlikely) that Moscow, New Delhi, and Teheran, etc. privately floated the idea of sending tens of thousands of their troops to Afghanistan, but if they had proposed any such thing, Washington must have said, "Thank you, but no thank you."


>Moreover, she leaves out how evil the Talibs were (and are). The
>(evil) US power elite's motives led them to leave this out before
>911 too, because they were willing to deal with the Talibs: the war
>on drugs, access to pipeline areas, etc. (I don't know what the US
>relationship to the Talibs was during the war against the USSR.)

<blockquote>In 1994 the Taliban emerge as a unified fighting force after being trained by the ISI in the same Pakistani religious schools and military camps as the Mujahideen. Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto acknowledges that the Taliban training colleges were "paid for by the United States and Britain."13

13 Quoted in Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, 27 January 1997 264(3), pg. 10

(Center for Economic and Social Rights, "Afghanistan Fact Sheet #2: A Brief History Focusing on 1979-2001," <http://cesr.org/filestore2/download/436>, October 2001)</blockquote>

The Taliban came into power in 1996, and for the next couple of years, the power elite were thinking if they would be a stabilizing force with whom they could do business:

<blockquote>In 1997 a World Bank study on routing large gas reserves discovered by Unocal in Turkmenistan states that the Afghanistan route would be much more profitable than existing Russian pipelines. Chris Taggart, Unocal executive vice president, remarks, "If the Taliban leads to stability and international recognition then it's positive."15

15 John Burns, "State Department Becomes Cooler to the New Rulers of Kabul", New York Times, 23 October 1996

(Center for Economic and Social Rights, "Afghanistan Fact Sheet #2: A Brief History Focusing on 1979-2001," <http://cesr.org/filestore2/download/436>, October 2001)</blockquote>

Things began to change with the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Unocal dropped its pipeline idea, and the Security Council imposed the sanctions on the Taliban in 1999: Resolution 1267, <http://www.un.int/usa/sres1267.htm>. -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



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