Why I Deserted: Dissident Joe Glenton on the Futility of the Afghan War and “War on Terror

 August 28th, 2021

By Lowkey

Source

In this frank discussion, Glenton opens up about the cult of imperialism within the British Army, his experiences with the opium trade, and the completely foreseeable collapse of the Afghan government.  

The world’s news feeds have been inundated this week with a deluge of images of the extremely hasty American retreat from Afghanistan. After militarily occupying the country for two decades and spending an estimated $2 trillion, the American-backed Afghan government lasted barely a week without U.S. troops backing it up. President Ashraf Ghani almost immediately fled to nearboring Tajikistan, reportedly taking hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen cash with him.

The scenes of desperate Afghans crowding into the last American planes have made this week an extremely embarrassing one for the U.S. and its allies. But what about the human cost of two decades of occupation?

One man who knows more than most about the absurdities of the war is Joe Glenton. A former soldier in the British Army, he refused to return to Afghanistan, citing his moral objections to the conflict, for which refusal he served six months in a military jail. Joe Glenton joins Watchdog host Lowkey to discuss his experiences and the recent events in the country.

Like many working class people, Glenton saw the military as a potential way out of poverty. He passed through basic training and was deployed to Kandahar Province in 2006. The Army told him he would be going there to help Afghan women, to allow girls to go to school, to build infrastructure, and to stop the booming illicit opium trade. However, he soon became disillusioned with what was going on. He developed a creeping sense of “I think we’re being lied to,” he told Lowkey. And what was sold as a peacekeeping mission almost immediately became a hot war. “It very quickly became clear that our presence had become a lightning rod. Where there hadn’t been an insurgency, there suddenly was one,” he added, noting that “on this supposed peacekeeping mission we ran out of high-artillery ammunition.”

After repeated mortar shelling, Glenton began manifesting the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and once back in the United Kingdom, he publicly refused to return, leaving the country but eventually coming back to fight his case. Today, he is an activist and a writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent and The New Internationalist. His book, “Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror,” was published in 2013.

In this frank discussion, Glenton opens up about the cult of imperialism within the British Army, his experiences with the opium trade, and the completely foreseeable collapse of the Afghan government.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

America’s Shameful War in Afghanistan: The US Involvement in the Drug Trade

BY Eric MargolisSource 

An ancient Hindu prayer says, ‘Lord Shiva, save us from the claw of the tiger, the fang of the cobra, and the vengeance of the Afghan.’

The United States, champion of freedom and self-determination, is now in its 18th year of colonial war in Afghanistan. This miserable, stalemated conflict is America’s longest and most shameful war. So far it has cost over $1 trillion and killed no one knows how many Afghans.

This conflict began in 2001 on a lie: namely that Afghanistan was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the US. These attacks were planned in Europe and the US, not Afghanistan, and apparently conducted (official version) by anti-American Saudi extremists. This writer remains unconvinced by the official versions.

We still don’t know if Osama bin Laden instigated the attacks. He was murdered rather than brought to trial. Dead men tell no tales. However, Mullah Omar, leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement, told my late friend journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave that bin Laden was not involved in 9/11. Who benefited? Certainly not the Afghans. They have been at war for the past 40 years.

As I wrote in my first book, ‘War at the Top of the World,’ Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribal majority were fierce fighters and were incredibly brave. Their Taliban movement was a tribal-nationalist-Islamist force devoted to fighting communism, drug dealing, and foreign influence. Taliban stamped out the Afghan opium trade and had just about crushed the drug-dealing Russian-backed Tajik northern alliance – until the US invaded in 2001. The Afghan drug lords quickly became US allies and remain so today.

Taliban was not a ‘terrorist movement,’ as western war propaganda falsely claimed. Twenty years earlier their fathers were hailed ‘freedom fighters’ by President Ronald Reagan when they were fighting Soviet occupation. Taliban’s Pashtun warriors wanted all foreigners out of their nation and the right to run their own affairs according to Islamic principles.

The US has savaged Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries. US B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers are razing tribal villages, predator killer drones attack most road movement, US-paid Afghan puppet forces, many former Communists, routinely torture and murder. All this while the US-installed yes-man regime in Kabul does nothing to halt massive drug dealing and human rights abuses.

In fact, dealing in opium and morphine is the primary business of Afghanistan. This cash crop could not be exported to Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia without the connivance of the Kabul regime and its US military protectors. When the full truth about the war is finally written, the US will be in the deepest shame over involvement in the drug trade.

Washington, which has done as much as the former Soviet invaders to ravage Afghanistan, has no clear idea what to do next. President Trump announced withdrawal of some of the 14,000 US troops (and large numbers of mercenaries) from Afghanistan. But then the pro-war neocons at State and the Pentagon sought to veto the president’s statement. Meanwhile, desultory talks are droning on in Doha, Qatar, between the US and Taliban, led by the US ‘special envoy’ (read proconsul) Zalmay Khalilzad, a neocon who played an important role in promoting the invasion of Iraq.

Why is the US still at war in Afghanistan after 18 years? First, because the politicians and generals involved won’t accept responsibility for a defeat and its huge cost. There is nothing more wasteful than a lost war. Second, because imperial-minded circles want to keep bases in Afghanistan to menace China, Iran and Pakistan. There are huge profits to be made from this endless war with its $400 per gallon gasoline trucked in from Karachi and 24-hour on-call air support. Plus the bases and fleet that support the war and promotion for the senior officers involved.

To keep this useless war against lightly armed Pashtun tribesmen going, the US must massively bribe Pakistan to maintain the military’s supply routes into that isolated nation. The absurd waste of US money in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been fully documented by the US government’s audit agencies.

President Trump is right to talk about ending this ignoble conflict. But the neocon fifth column he has foolishly helped install keeps thwarting his aspirations.

Trump should order the fighting ended and all US troops out of Afghanistan within 90 days. End US involvement in the drug trade. Tell India to butt out of Afghanistan. That would be statesmanship. Afghanistan must be allowed to return to its former obscurity.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

ISIS: The United States’ Next Ally in Afghanistan

By CJ Werleman
Source

Afghanistan is known for being the “graveyard of empires,” but when the time comes for the last US soldier or military contractor to step foot onto a waiting C-130 Hercules, bound permanently for home, the country might also become known as the graveyard for every counter-insurgency theory, strategy, method, and instrument known to military planners.

Only months after successfully overthrowing the Taliban regime in 2001, US and coalition forces have been locked in a violent insurgency against an array of anti-government insurgent groups, including the Taliban, Haqqani network, Hezb-i-Islami, foreign fighters, disparate local tribes, transnational criminal organizations, and more recently ISIS.

US forces have tried and failed to establish and train competent and incorruptible Afghan police forces away from the urban centers; it has tried and failed to improve the quality of local governance; it has tried and failed to eliminate the insurgent’s support base in Pakistan; it has failed to understand and appreciate the importance of locals in counterinsurgency operations.

It’s thus little wonder Afghanistan has become the longest combat deployment for US forces by a long shot, having now been in-country for 17 counter-productive years.

In the nearly two decades since the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, and having faced the wrath of the world’s greatest superpower every day since the months after the September 11 attacks, the extremist group has seized numerous districts throughout northern Afghanistan, and today controls the largest piece of turf it has held since 2001.

As such, US President Donald Trump has had enough, telling aids he “doesn’t care” about Afghanistan, while continually chastising the generals for being “dumb.” In December of last year, Trump announced his decision to withdraw roughly half of the remaining 15,000 US troops there.

Trump’s foreign policy strategy for 2019, as incoherent and impossible to actually decipher it may seem, is “let others fight our battles.”

But who is the other in Afghanistan? I mean, other than the Afghan National Army?

Could ISIS be the United States’ next ally in its war against the Taliban and other insurgent groups?

Well, consider that the Taliban claimed that US warplanes and drones killed 16 of its fighters in western Afghanistan while it was carrying out military operations against fighters loyal to ISIS in August of last year.

Consider also that Russia has accused US of using “unidentified helicopters” to ferry arms and ammunition to ISIS fighters the northern Afghan province of Sar-e-Pul.

“We still expecting from our American colleagues an answer to the repeatedly raised questions, questions that arose on the basis of public statements made by the leaders of some Afghan provinces, that unidentified helicopters, most likely helicopters to which NATO in one way or another is related, fly to the areas where the insurgents are based, and no one has been able to explain the reasons for these flights yet,” stated Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. “In general they [the United States] try to avoid answers to these legitimate questions.”

The United States, however, has rejected these claims as “completely untrue,” but still – where’s there’s smoke, there’s often fire, so to speak.

Now consider also, however, that the Iranian English language news service Tasnim News Agencypublished a report alleging US forces operating in Afghanistan carried out a secret military operation in the northwestern province of Badghis two weeks ago, which helped ISIS inmates escape the prison the Taliban held them in.

The report added, “That 40 “Daesh ring leaders, all of them foreigners, were transferred by helicopters after American troops raided the prison and killed all its security guards.”

The report also claims a prominent ISIS commander known as Aminullah from Uzbekistan was one of those freed and taken away by US helicopters after US special forces killed the prison guards.

“Informed sources suggest that the Uzbekistani national had established close contact with the American military forces since the early days of moving to Afghanistan,” according to Tasnim News Agency. “Americans used to employ Aminullah as an undercover among the Taliban to acquire information for carrying out operations against the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.”

Again, none of these claims are independently verified, and read only as a conspiracy in the making, but the question must be asked – what would the US gain in using ISIS as a proxy partner in Afghanistan?

Well, there are a number of plausible explanations here, including the fact that fighting between the Taliban and ISIS has been escalating in recent months; that ISIS seeks to disrupt any peace talks between the US and Taliban, which the US might see in being helpful to weaken the Taliban’s position at the bargaining table; and that Russia, the United States’ long-time geopolitical rival, is increasing its support for the Taliban.

While there’s no smoking Kalashnikov yet to be found here proving a US-ISIS alliance in Afghanistan, the United States has a long and distinguished history of arming past enemies to fight current foes, and arming ISIS might turn out to be merely its next desperate measure in its increasingly desperate military presence in the “graveyard of empires.”

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!