By Peter Koenig for The Saker Blog
All flags are on half-mast in the US of A. The cause are the 13 American soldiers killed in this huge suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, on Thursday, 26 August.
As it stands, at least 150 people – Afghans, including at least 30 Taliban – plus 13 American military – were killed and at least 1,300 injured, according to the Afghan Health Ministry.
The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the bombing via Amaq Media, the official Islamic State (ISIS) news agency. The perpetrators, the message says, were members of the ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.
As reported by RT, US military leaders knew “hours in advance” that a “mass casualty event” was planned at Kabul airport. However, accounts from the troops in harm’s way suggest that nothing was done to protect them or the airport. See this https://www.rt.com/usa/533462-pentagon-knew-kabul-suicide-bombing/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Email .
Rt further reports, “The bombing provoked the US into launching two drone strikes, one targeting an alleged “planner” and “facilitator” with the group responsible, and another supposedly wiping out “multiple” would-be suicide bombers but reportedly annihilating a family and children alongside them.
Why was nothing done to prevent this bloody, atrocious attack? – In fact, the Pentagon announced just yesterday that another massive attack was likely, meaning they have information that another mass-killing may take place?
In the meantime, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that the last three US military transport planes have departed the Hamid Karzai Airport just ahead of the August 31, 2021, deadline, officially ending the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“The war is over. America’s last troops have just left Kabul airport,” RT’s Murad Gazdiev tweeted from Kabul, adding that the war lasted “19 years, 10 months and 25 days.”
What he didn’t say is that the monetary cost of the war was at least 3 trillion dollars, that about 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians. These figures include (through April 2021) 2,448 American service members; 3,846 U.S. contractors, and some 66,000 Afghan national military and police. See this https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan .
—-
Twenty years of war – and only ten days to defeat the US military.
Really? – Is this really the end of the US involvement in Afghanistan? Too many strange events and occurrences are pointing in a different direction.
Let’s have a closer look. The Islamic State – ISIS claims responsibility. As we know by now and since quite a while, ISIS is a creation of the CIA. The sophistication of the attack, the Pentagon non-interference, despite their prior knowledge, might, just might – indicate that this attack may have been a well-coordinated “false flag”?
Who benefits? Cui Bono?
On August 19, 2021, the Washington Post, referring to President Trump’s Peace Agreement with Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, reports – “As President Donald Trump’s administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we’ll be successful in the end.” His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, asserted that the administration was “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.”
“Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is pointing to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.”
“But Biden can go only so far in claiming the agreement boxed him in. It had an escape clause: The U.S. could have withdrawn from the accord if Afghan peace talks failed. They did, but Biden chose to stay in it, although he delayed the complete pullout from May to September.”
See full story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/was-biden-handcuffed-by-trumps-taliban-deal-in-doha/2021/08/19/a7ee1a50-00a2-11ec-87e0-7e07bd9ce270_story.html
So, again who benefits from such an atrociously deadly attack, like the one of 26 August at Kabul Airport?
President Biden, though unjustified, can and does blame President Trump for the chaos he left behind by negotiating this “irresponsible” Peace Deal. Why “irresponsible”? Wasn’t it time after 20 years without apparent “success” – whatever that means, or may have meant at some point in time – to end this senseless bloodshed and destruction of a sovereign Afghan society – let alone the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians?
It seems that Mr. Trump may have done the right thing. Peace over war should always win, on the ground as well as in the minds of people, and foremost of politicians. However, there are several reasons, why Peace is not welcome. And chaos and destruction and death as demonstrated by the 26 August suicide attack, and who knows, maybe more to follow, might justify sending back US troops?
There are several other irons in the fire about which hardly anybody talks and the bought anti-Trump and pro-Biden mainstream media are silent.
The Heroin Trade
There is a multi-multi-billion, perhaps up to a trillion-dollar heroin trade at stake, for the US and for the US and European pharma-industry – the huge and deadly opioid-market.
As reported by Michel Chossudovsky on 21 August 2021, “One of the key strategic objectives of the 2001 war on Afghanistan was to restore the opium trade following the Taliban government’s successful 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a 94% collapse in opium production. This program was supported by the United Nations. (For details, see below)
In the course of the last 19 years following the US-NATO October 2001 invasion, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. In turn the number of heroin addicts in the US has increased dramatically. Is there a relationship?
There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan.
By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users).
In 2020, at the height of the covid crisis, deaths from opioids and drug addiction increased threefold.
It’s Big Money for Big Pharma.”
See the full report https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-spoils-of-war-afghanistan-s-multibillion-dollar-heroin-trade/91
The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative
Both, China and Russia have already indicated that they would help the new Taliban regime to gain stability – and to develop towards a newly independent, sovereign state. Afghanistan’s border with China, only about 70 km wide, but it forms a crucial connection to China’s western most Province, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It is a vital pivot for China’s Belt and Road, or “One Belt One Road” – OBOR – also called the New Silk Road.
While transit routes already go through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, an OBOR rail and road transit through Afghanistan would connect China directly with Iran, facilitating among other trade, hydrocarbon transport from Iran to China. OBOR would also be an effective development instrument for war destroyed Afghanistan – a reconstruction and economic development scheme for Afghanistan could bring Afghanistan back to a respected nation state – even through the Taliban.
Furthermore, Afghanistan might be prepared for becoming an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), one of the world’s most significant political, economic and strategic defense organization. In addition to China and Russia and the Central Asian former Soviet Republics, India and Pakistan are already full members, while Iran, Malaysia and Mongolia are, so far, in observer and associate status.
SCO covers almost half of the world population and controls some 30% of the world’s GDP. Afghanistan would be in a solid and guiding association as an SCO member. Afghanistan’s socioeconomic development and improvement of war-damaged people’s standard of living, could benefit enormously.
Washington however dislikes OBOR with a passion. They see it as Chinese expansionism and competition. It is actually neither. China has in her thousands of years of history never had expansionist trends, or ambitions, and always respected other countries’ sovereignty. OBOR, an ingenious idea of President Xi Jinping, is patterned according to the ancient Silk Road, a trading route of 2100 years ago connecting Asia with Europe and the Middle East.
OBOR is an instrument to help develop and connect the world, while respecting each nation state’s independence and sovereignty.
——
The hugely profitable Heroin Trade and the further development of China’s OBOR – and particularly bringing Afghanistan under the wings of the east through association with the SCO – would spoil America’s multi-multibillion heroin trade, as well as another Middle East country would orient itself to the east – and away from the fangs of the ever weakening and crumbling Anglo-US empire.
Hence, commanding US-created ISIS to sow chaos and death in Afghanistan, blaming the Taliban, might be a good reason for Biden to bring back US troops – to fight a new kind war – fighting for the continuing highly profitable heroin trade and, simultaneously, fighting against OBOR. On top of it all, it would suit the Biden’s and his globalist agenda’s image – and standing in a totally misinformed world.
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is also a a non-resident Sr. Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
“Since Afghanistan emerged as a modern state, there have been three wars with Britain. The British invasion of 1839 produced initial victory for the intruders followed by stunning defeat followed by a second victory. In 1878, the British invaded again. Though they suffered a major defeat at Maiwand, their main army beat the Afghans. The British then re-drew the frontier of British India up to the Khyber Pass, and Afghanistan had to cede various frontier areas. In the Third Anglo-Afghan war, the fighting was launched by the Afghans. Amanullah Khan sent troops into British India in 1919. Within a month they were forced to retreat, in part because British planes bombed Kabul in one of the first displays of airpower in central Asia. The war ended in tactical victory for the British but their troop losses were twice those of the Afghans, suggesting the war was a strategic defeat. The British abandoned control of Afghan foreign policy at last.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/27/10-myths-about-afghanistan
Foreigners have always had a hard time occupying Afghanistan for long. The British eventually came to understand that. “From bitter experience they kept their interventions short, preferring domination over foreign affairs to the option of colonization that they adopted in India.” It has taken the USA twenty years to come to the same conclusion.
It was complicated by the simple fact that the pretext for the war was the false-flag attacks of 9/11. Every American president since then has had to dance around the horrible truth that Israel attacked us on that day and got away with it. This includes both Trump and Biden. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) was the lone ‘no’ vote in Congress against the war in Afghanistan in 2001, voting against an authorization for use of military force (AUMF) shortly after the attacks. At the time, she was reviled for being unpatriotic, even receiving death threats. “When I voted ‘no,’ I said it was a blank check and would set the stage for perpetual war, and that’s what it’s done,” she said. How right she was.
There will be no redeployment of any NATO mercenaries to Afghanistan. Sure, in the eyes of the 99% in the US, the rout suffered is total anathema which hurts really badly as the 20th anniversary of 911 is approaching. Were it left to the US 99% to decide, Afghanistan should be wiped off the face of the earth. Sadly for them, the ruling 1% understood in full that it was game over. The geopolitical pull of the OBOR/BRI led by a vastly superior Chinese economy and ditto government proved too much. At present, I would rather focus on Erdogan and his usual attempts at uninvited scavenging and plotting as the most pressing issue for the Talibans with regard to Afghanistan’s foreign policy. The Taliban would provide a sterling service to vast swaths of the planet if they just promptly took out RTE. The West is defeated and cannot do shit about it.
I don’t know if this is off-topic but Transcrime in Italy has largely debunked common myth of Mafia’s huge incomes from drugs and illegal profits generally. Unlike often claimed e g Mafia organizations don’t earn $120-145 billion but likely 5-10% of that sum (around 8.4 – 13 billion). When it comes drugs Mafia earned not 40 billion but little bit over $1 billion.
Narcotics is not even near as lucrative business as often claimed by media and even police. Theodore Dalrymple has also underlined that heroin doesn’t hook user. Instead it’s user who hooks heroin.
And that’s where the journey to human beviour to hype and fantasize certain things starts. In America living in fantasies seems to be a norm.
(During 1941-44 Finnish armed forces consumed staggering 250 million pills of heroin, morphine or opium, (mostly 5 mg heroin pills) but hardly more than 500 people addicted, most of them not even front line soldiers.)
”All flags are on half-mast in the US of A. The cause are the 13 American soldiers killed in this huge suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, on Thursday, 26 August.”
Makes sense. Exceptional and indispensable people are few and far between in this world. But can one really expect a die-hard Islamist to show any compassion for people that rightly should be high above criticism; to wit Pindos (and Jews) ?
Hence, commanding US-created ISIS to sow chaos … – to fight a new kind war – fighting for the continuing highly profitable heroin trade and, simultaneously, fighting against OBOR.
Couldn’t agree more Peter. The Hegemon is going to fight tooth and nail to preserve its hegemony. It’s going to fight even harder — through whatever means — now that its satrapies including the satrapy-in-chief, the UK, have grown a semblance of a spine to criticise even Calamity Joe post Afghan retreat.
… another Middle East country would orient itself to the east …
I’m not sure which ME country you mean but if it is KSA, forget it. So too Apartheid Israel. The ZioWahhabi Sauds and ZioJews are of one mind. Israel controls the US while second fiddle Sauds are deadly afraid of the false jihadis they fathered ideologically and supported financially. It’s happened before — Juhayman al-Otaybi for instance. There is nothing to stop ‘Ikhwan’ (Muslim Brotherhood) Turkey, KSA’s competitor for leadership in the Sunni world, to shift the flow of ISIS to its former province in the Arabian peninsula — the chickens would really have come home to roost then.
An excellent article by Peter Koeing who encompasses much of the Afghanistan issue. It should also be noted that the UK is keeping some of their troops there, which, invariably means, following the US dictates.
The growing relationship between China, Eurasia, Russia is the perfect trade route for both Afghanistan and Iran. Of course, this IS the reason why the US WILL NOT “leave.” To maintain its damaged hegemony is paramount for its geo-political/economic reasons. The heroin issue remains very important, too, for US/UK/EU Big Pharmacies.
We envision the US maneuvering its way in the area using bought off ISIS and other wayward radicals in the area. We should expect more killings, and greater tragedy for the people of Afghanistan.
USAmerica is going to keep substantial forces in Afghanistan, and even re-invade? Really? Good luck with that cloud-cuckoo-land idea, as USAmerica continues to slide helplessly into its very own ‘collapse of USSR’ time, starting with what we’re seeing right now, the beginning of the collapse of the ’empire of bases’.
US troops abroad will be lucky if they don’t find themselves stranded, unable to get home, derelict, and surrounded by hostile populaces.
It will be all the Washington mafias can do to keep their own federal-republic oligarchy together, avoid multi-player civil wars, and multiple secessions of individual states; quite apart from the growing re-invasion of Hispanic people from the South, who are looking likely to re-convert considerable parts of the US Southwest back into Latino-speaking polities.
‘World policeman’, indeed! Sick joke! Retired, ill and broke ex-cop desperately planting prepper potatoes, more like.
The US may well end up having to invite in – or just to meekly allow in – Russian and Chinese ‘stabilisation’ forces, to halt its slide into utter catastrophe; especially with all those elderly ICBMs, rotting quietly in their silos.
Paying and supporting US troops is just so 20th century. All US wars will be proxy wars from here on out. Cheaper, officially at least, as most of the funding is off the books, and deniable, it offers much more bang for the buck for the dying empire. And since the whole point of it all is just to sow chaos and dissension throughout the world, never mind line the pockets of the private contractors and foreign agents doing the heavy lifting, what’s not to love? Yes indeed, the times, they are a changing!
I’m not sure how many of US soldiers in Afghanistan were actually combat ground force soldiers. In Vietnam there were in highest point 540, 000 American GIs. However only 70,000 were combat soldiers and at maximum some 40,000 could have been sent to frontline combat. Comparing these figures NLF/NVA really mauled US combat forces badly.
And now losing few thousands soldiers is short period will decimate US military. This is the truth of “most powerful military forces on earth”.
“Let’s have a closer look. The Islamic State – ISIS claims responsibility. As we know by now and since quite a while, ISIS is a creation of the CIA.”
As it happens, this is not the case – I’m not one for defending the CIA, but they did not create ISIS. I’m not one for doing other people’s research for them, but it is not that difficult to track that ISIS emerged from the earlier ISI – Islamic State of Iraq which was also known as Al-Qaida in Iraq, although that is not what they called themselves. ISI was an insurgent group that itself grew out of the MSC – Mujahadeen Shura Council which itself was a merger of insurgent groups led by Ahmad al-Kalayleh/ Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who came to Iraq just before the US invasion in 2003 from Afghanistan, where he was injured helping to evacuate Osama bin Laden’s wife & children from the war zone. Zarqawi’s original group, affiliated with Ansar al-Islam, was Tawheed fil Jihad, starting in 2003, gathered up some global jihadists & ex-Saddam era military intelligence personnel, people like Haji Bakr. This group defeated the US military in the first battle of Fallujah, & near defeated them in the second battle, later going on to defeat the US military in Ramadi. To cut a long story short, when Barak Obama became US president, he ordered for thousands of prisoners to be released from Iraqi prisons including insurgents from ISI, it seems that a deal was done with ISI to stop attacking remaining US troops & to take their war into Syria. At this point a kind of partnership begins where yes, the CIA are now working with ISI come ISIS. It is a complicated story, but the CIA did not create them, all the most notorious leaders of ISIS had all fought against the US military in Fallujah, Ramadi & Tal Afar, including the current Caliph, al-Mawla.
According to Lavrov CSTO will determine Russia’s stance not China and the SCO as also seen in the Russian National Security Strategy.
Lavrov: CSTO will decide our position with Kabul
2 hours agoAdd Commentby The Frontier Post
Written by The Frontier Post
MOSCOW (TASS): Russia and Armenia as members of the Collective Security Tre-aty Organization (CSTO) want to see Afghanistan prosper and support decisions that would not push the country into the hands of terrorists and drug traffickers, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference on Tuesday following talks with his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan when asked what joint position Moscow and Yerevan hold on the Afghan issue as CSTO members.
“The position in favor of peace, prosperity and security in this region, peace and prosperity for the Afghan people and the decision that should rule out any future possibilities that Afghanistan’s territories can be used by terrorists, drug traffickers and other organized criminals,” he said.
“Our approaches will be specifically formulated in the CSTO framework at the high-level meeting which will be held in mid-September in Dushanbe. This topic will also be discussed at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit which will be held in the Tajik capital after the CSTO summit,” Lavrov added.
https://thefrontierpost.com/lavrov-csto-will-decide-our-position-with-kabul/
The following shows how Russia is changing the terms in which they view the CSTO.
The fact that even talking about including Syria in the CSTO was something I had not considered.
Inclusion of Syria in the CSTO is in Russia’s interests
Analytics 28.08.2021 1 comment Views
The head of the Main Military-Political Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Andrei Kartapolov, recently announced the possibility of including Syria in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The CSTO Charter is not a dogma, it must correspond to the immediate situation, if such a step would be beneficial to all parties to the Treaty, including Syria, then why not.
https://www.putin-today.ru/archives/132363#comments
Russia’s National Security Strategy-excerpt
The Greater Eurasian Partnership (GEP) prominently made its debut in the 2021 National Security Strategy, although Putin first introduced the term in the 2015 Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly. There is no doubt about the stability and longevity of the concept, which in recent years has become part of the official Russian discourse; however, it still needs to be filled with political and economic substance.
While the goal of the GEP is still rather vaguely formulated in the NSS – “Ensuring the integration of economic systems and the development of multilateral cooperation” – its strategic rationale is crystal clear. Moscow is insisting that no single national economic system should dominate Eurasia. While not overtly stated, the GEP inter alia is an attempt to avoid a Chinese monopoly in Eurasia, by building interaction mechanisms between China’s Belt and Road and various multilateral initiatives. The lack of concrete details leaves Russia with room to maneuver when interpreting the partnership in the future. Still, the most challenging task will be to sell the idea of a Eurasian “spaghetti bowl” to China. Elevating this issue to a strategic level means that the GEP is not just about economic integration, but also a matter of geopolitics with a central question: Who will have the lead in determining the rules of the game across Eurasia?
https://thediplomat.com/2021/07/what-russias-national-security-strategy-has-to-say-about-asia/