Why are we in Afghanistan? We must begin, not on 9/11, but in 1992 with the “Defense Planning Guidance” which proposed that the new political and military mission of the United States, (with the demise of the Soviet Union) was to assure that no rival or group of rivals could emerge to challenge our primacy as the hegemonic world super power. This was the first time American intent to dominate the entire world was explicitly stated. This required the establishment of military bases across the globe, now numbering 1100, creating in geo-political jargon “strategic depth” in every region of the world.
Though formulated at the end of the first Bush administration, the plan observed that Taliban control of Afghanistan would serve to hand its neighbor, Pakistan, additional muscle vis- à- vis India, thereby upsetting the balance of our “strategic depth” scenario in the region. When George W. Bush became President in 2000, the brain trust that produced the Defense Planning Guidance, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perl et al, took leading roles in the new administration and proceeded to implement the strategy - patriotically renamed The Project for the New American Century. Although the Taliban was strictly nationalist and had exhibited no prosecutable designs outside Afghanistan, strange good fortune presented a new enemy, Al Qaeda, which conveniently headquartered itself in that benighted country.
Although we know, if the 9/11 Commission Report is to be believed, that the alleged nineteen perpetrators of the attack of Sept. 11th lived and trained in this country for years, and received communications and funding ($500,000) telephonically and electronically, from a command structure dispersed in different locations around the world, and that the total number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan never numbered more than a few score at most; our considered response to the attack was to send 120,000 troops and spend a trillion dollars to invade the third poorest country on earth, to deny Al Qaeda a locale to plan operations that could have as easily been planned in a rented conference room of any Marriot Hotel.
So, if you have ever wondered why we are in still in Afghanistan long after the few Al Qaeda have departed, and how we smoothly transitioned from Al Qaeda to the Taliban as the targeted enemy, read the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. The Guidance, combined with the mutable rationalizations for our subsequent invasion of Iraq, may clarify the pretext for the murky “War on Terror”, a phrase so tactically vague it is synonymous with a “War on Possibly Dangerous People with Ten Fingers”, and expose the opportune license it has granted our world-wide military expansion that all too perfectly dovetails with the prerequisites of the fundamental stratagem. It may not be a false polemic to speculate our children are not dying and killing to advance freedom or to secure the homeland, but rather to advance the empire project of megalomaniacs.
Some may disagree with my harsh assessment of our government’s actions and motives. Others may prefer to believe in the innate goodness imbued in our ethical soil that wouldn’t allow or condone such sordid maneuvers. But even if cast in the best possible light, and the prospect of world hegemony might bring some consonance to worldly affairs, we must still deal with the stubborn fact that after ten years the most powerful and technologically advanced military machine in the world is unable to defeat the ragtag Taliban. That crystallizing reality would seem to undermine the whole arrogant thesis of The New American Century, and might challenge the decent sensibilities of the most patriotic muggle. It may also alert the wise to abandon such foolishness, with the first step in the return to sanity being withdrawal from the quagmire of Afghanistan.
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