What are US troops dying for in Afghanistan?

At least 21 US soldiers and Marines have been killed in Afghanistan since last weekend, making October the bloodiest month for US forces since they invaded the country eight years ago...Among those killed in the last several days was a 24-year-old California mother of two young daughters, Sgt. Eduviges Wolf...The escalation of the war, which President Barack Obama is expected to announce soon, will only drive up casualties...What are these sacrifices for?

These questions are posed all the more sharply by the revelation that the US Central Intelligence Agency has kept President Hamid Karzai’s brother, a reputed kingpin in Afghanistan’s multibillion-dollar drug trade, on its payroll for the last eight years...

The newspaper describes a highly intimate relationship between the CIA and Ahmed Wali Karzai, who helped found a paramilitary outfit known as the Kandahar Strike Force that “operates at the CIA’s direction” in carrying out assassinations of suspected “insurgents.” CIA special operations agents, meanwhile, utilize compounds provided by Karzai as bases for their own operations in the south of the country.

...Afghanistan currently supplies 90 percent of the world’s heroin. Since the US invasion of the country, opium production has increased by more than 300 percent... Before 1979, there was no large-scale poppy cultivation or any production of heroin in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These countries became the center of world heroin production as a byproduct of the CIA’s fomenting of a war by Islamist mujahedin against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. While the US poured in billions of dollars in money and arms to fuel this war, drugs provided a major supplementary funding source for the CIA-backed guerrillas.

In the 1980s war against Nicaragua, the shipment of cocaine into the US provided resources for the CIA-backed contras at a time when the US Congress had cut off funding. And in the Vietnam War, the CIA allied itself with heroin-trafficking warlords in Laos who exploited the US troops as a market.

In all of these wars, US intervention has produced death, destruction and social degradation, including the proliferation of drug production and consumption. An inevitable byproduct of the ongoing intervention in Afghanistan will be a steady rise in heroin addiction in the US and around the world.

Are US troops dying to keep in power a government dominated by drug-trafficking warlords?
...So it would seem. But the Karzais and their warlord allies are puppets of US policy, used by Washington as merely a means to an end...The real objectives of this war were spelled out in fairly candid terms in an article published last year in the magazine of the US Army War College by Dr. Stephen Blank, the college’s professor of National Security Studies...(In) “The Strategic Importance of Central Asia: An American View..." Blank argues that the US is pursuing an “open door” policy in Central Asia “for American firms seeking energy exploration, refining, and marketing.” US policy, he says, is aimed at “the prevention of a Russian energy monopoly” in Central Asia or the region’s domination by China. It also seeks to isolate Iran, another potential regional rival.

“Not surprisingly,” Blank continues “the leitmotif of US energy policy has been focused on fostering the development of multiple pipelines and links to foreign consumers and producers of energy” that bypass the control of these regional rivals...The American military is fighting in Afghanistan as part of a 21st century version of the “Great Game,” in which US imperialism is seeking to dominate Central Asia and its energy resources at the expense of its strategic rivals.

There is no doubt that the Obama administration will continue to pursue these aims through an escalation of the Afghan war. The costs of this war, now pegged at $3.6 billion a month, will rise even higher with the deployment of more troops, and will be paid by working people in the US through attacks on their living standards and basic social benefits...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pers-o29.shtml

attack from Hamburg again. Maybe blow up the whole world this time. Kil Kill Kill.

wait...I thought it was for everybody's Freedums?

K&R

Interesting article

Control those, control the heroin market.

That would be admiting that rich people are drug dealers. That could cause a revolution. They don't want that.

I don't anymore. Maybe he could tell us. Maybe he isn't allowed to.

"Losing is not an option."

Some of our politicians think they can "do better" than the last administration, and they're damn well determined to show the American public as much. The sad fact is that those same politicians are not ready to go "all in". They think pecking away at the problem will solve it.

NOT gonna happen.

What WILL happen is American servicemen and women will die in twos and fews until the American public has had quite enough and in 2010 they'll say as much at the voting booth.

AND VOTE FOR NOBODY

:shrug: Or maybe someone doesn't care what we want/think?

Of course, the board game was about money, military power, access to resources and positioning on a world map. Nothing to do with actual living, breathing humans. No "costs" were measured in lives or any human response to those game moves. Sick. Vicious. Murderous. Indifferent. Psychopaths.

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That $3.6 billion a month would be better spent guarding our own borders.

to investigate whether or not someone Xeroxed their butt on the White House copiers just before Bush was sworn in ...

If we pull out, all previous deaths are suddenly "in vain". And the guy that orders the pullout automatically hates all those who died before. So nobody wants to order the pullout, and be labeled "weak" and "traitorous".

There's a sort of logic to this death spiral, but I wish our prez had the spine and desire to end it.

Nothing good can come of the wars. There is no outcome that resembles a peaceful, democratic, friendly nation, no matter how hard we try to build one.