No End to Hegemon USA's Designs on Afghanistan

by Stephen Lendman

If hell on earth exists, its epicenter is in Afghanistan — a perpetual war zone for centuries.

"(N)o country has been abused and suffered more, and none has been helped less than Afghanistan," John Pilger explained.

For time immemorial, Afghans endured what few outside the country can imagine. 

For centuries, marauding armies besieged its cities, committed mass slaughter, and caused vast destruction.

In the 19th century, Afghans were victimized by "great game" struggles between imperial Britain and czarist Russia.

Perpetual war, occupation and human misery continue with no end of it in prospect ahead — US pullout likely to be a brief moment of partial relief alone.

Since the 1990s, Gideon Polya estimated over six million Afghan deaths, millions displaced, an entire population held hostage to US/NATO imperial rampaging.

Looking ahead, their withdrawal is likely to prove more illusion than reality.

Left behind are covert CIA operatives, paramilitary hired guns, private military contractors, and likely other US/Western dark forces.

Afghanistan is resource rich, its mineral wealth potentially worth trillions of dollars, a prize US/Western corporate predators seek to exploit in perpetuity.

It includes barite, chromite, coal, cobalt, copper, gold, iron ore, lead, enormous amounts of highly-valued lithium and other rare earth metals vital for high tech products, natural gas, oil, precious and semi-precious stones, potash, salt, sulfur, talc, zinc, among other minerals.

Under US control, Afghanistan became the world's largest opium producer — what's used to  produce heroin and other illicit opioids.

In his book titled "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade," Alfred McCoy documented CIA and US government complicity in drugs trafficking at the highest official levels.

Ongoing in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South and Central America, it provides a global supply of illicit drugs.

Worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually — more than all legal drugs combined — the CIA, money laundering banks, and organized crime profit hugely from a gift that keeps on giving.

In occupied Afghanistan, US-installed puppet regime officials cashed in big from the trade.

In the 1990s, the Taliban eliminated the vast majority of opium production in the country, what they'll surely go all-out to do again as long as they're governing.

The Biden regime didn't pull out of the country with intent to abandon US imperial aims in central Asia, far from it.

In his book, titled "The Grand Chessboard," former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called Eurasia the "center of world power…"

It "extend(s) from Germany and Poland in the East through Russia and China to the Pacific…including the Middle East and Indian subcontinent."

Dominating this region — including Afghanistan because of its strategic location — assures US access to and control over its vast energy and other resources.

Pre-9/11, Washington sought to work with the Taliban, believing its control of the country would assure stability.

Both right wings of the US war party are indifferent toward and hostile to equity and justice, human and civil rights, along with democratic governance as it should be — notions its ruling regimes pay meaningless lip service to alone.

US sought control of Afghanistan is also about wanting oil and gas pipelines built from the landlocked Caspian Basin to warm water ports in the south — without crossing territory in Russia or Iran.

9/11 provided a state-sponsored pretext for US aggression and occupation — to pursue its central Asia hegemonic aims.

They have nothing to do with liberating nations and helping their people.

They're all about sought control over planet earth, its resources and populations — what the scourge of imperialism is all about at the expense of what just societies hold dear.

For centuries and under US occupation, Afghanistan was raped and destroyed, millions of its people killed, millions more displaced.

Post-911 under US/NATO control, millions in the country lost security, shelter, employment, education, medical care, for many little or no access to food, and countless numbers more their lives.

Great game competition in Afghanistan is likely ahead between Sino/Russia and the US.

Afghans stand to benefit from involvement by China and Russia in the country — what hegemon USA denied them.

Its dark forces have no intention of going quietly into that good night on all things Afghanistan — the same true for all other nations free from their control.

Their imperial aims are certain to continue ahead — what China and Russia will likely seek to prevent by working cooperatively with the Taliban.

A new Afghan great game awaits to unfold, its outcome unlikely to be known any time soon.

A Final Comment

Forever wars by hot and other means reflect longstanding US policy against nations free from its control.

The late Gore Vidal's book, titled "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" explained how America operates and became reviled.

"I don't see us winning," he stressed. "We have made enemies of one billion Muslims," adding:

Hegemon USA is "rotting away at a funereal pace." 

"We'll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together."

US culture is violent, how it's been forever and a day, peace and stability nonstarters.

From inception, the US glorified wars and violence in the name of peace its ruling regimes abhor.

Psychiatrist Charles Johnstone earlier called violence a drug.

In "addicted" USA, the illusory American dream is nightmarish for most in the country and abroad in nations targeted for regime change.

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home - Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

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"How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War"

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"Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity"

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