By Debra Sweet

19 years. The longest foreign war in the bloody history of the U.S. empire.  Afghanistan: geographically in the way of imperial conquerors for centuries, historically preyed upon by various military forces and further torn apart by the U.S. and its NATO allies in the global "war on terror."

The U.S. aggression on Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on the globe, has to be condemned for its devilish destruction of life.  The Watson Institute at Brown University says, "As of October 2019, more than 43,000 civilians are estimated to have died violent deaths as a result of the war."  But, as we know from first-hand accounts by journalists, the deaths were mostly uncounted.  It's from Afghanistan that hundreds of Muslim pilgrims and farmers were kidnapped for bounty, ending up in Guantanamo for years, many having nothing to do with al Queda or the Taliban. Despite the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld claim that the war would be launched to save Afghan women, it remains one of the most dangerous places for a woman.  43% of people have "basic" sanitation and the maternal death rate remains high.  All sides use rape as a weapon of war.  All three U.S. administrations are responsible: Bush, Obama, Trump.

The Washington Post's Afghanistan Project revealed the sheer incompetence, brutality and lying of the U.S. occupation. "Over the course of 18 years, three administrations have deployed nearly 800,000 troops (2,400 of whom were killed), dropped 40,000 bombs, filled the skies with high tech drones to spread terror and direct air strikes, and spent at least a trillion dollars. Again and again their best political and military strategists have come up with new plans and spent years trying to implement each one." But, as the Afghanistan Project sums up, “military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail.”  Read more in “The Afghanistan Papers”: The Lies Exposed — and the Deeper Truths That Need to Come Out.

This situation continues to this day, as Pompeo negotiates with the Taliban, after getting essentially nowhere.  Then there's his boss:  “If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don't want to kill 10 million people” (stated by Trump in 2019).