US invasion of Afghanistan starts 20th year
Ramin Mazaheri
Press TV, Chicago
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan has now begun its 20th year. The United States has been discredited, if not totally defeated. Washington signed a conditional peace agreement with the Taliban in February and a peace process began in September.
In 2010 George W. Bush-era war atrocities were exposed by Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who is now the West’s most prominent political prisoner.
The administration of Barack Obama failed to keep the so-called “Afghanistan Papers” secret, which indisputably proved that “the American people have constantly been lied to” about the war in Afghanistan.
The Papers also revealed that Washington’s “biggest single project has been the development of mass corruption”. Money was funnelled to US-linked contractors for unneeded and unwanted infrastructure projects. Independent estimates say the US has spent or obligated $3 trillion on the war, even though the Great Recession has ravaged the American lower classes since 2007.
Just like in Iraq the US had no exit strategy, causing many to say that Washington never intended to end a war of imperialism. The past decade alone has seen at least 100,000 Afghan civilian casualties - 40% of them are women or children. The UN mission did not tally civilian casualties during the first decade.
The war in Afghanistan led to a huge increase in the militarization of US society, with laws like the Patriot Act accused of drastically undermining the rights of Americans. Since 2001 Afghan drug production has nearly tripled, fuelling an unprecedented opioid crisis in the United States.
The invasion has gone on for so long that many American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan now were not even born when 9/11 happened. Nineteen years ago few would have predicted that, but many did correctly predict that the war would mercilessly and unjustly devastate the people of Afghanistan.
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