Afghanistan and Iraq withdrawal deadlines to be extended, again

Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

It is strange how right after a group of Taliban fighters were allegedly able to take out a Special Forces Chinook with a shoulder-mounted rocket; support is quickly rallied to justify keeping troops in Afghanistan until “at least” 2024, according to The Daily Telegraph.

In a climate where the United States and NATO are more despised by the Afghan people than ever, it seems a bit too convenient that there was such a hefty loss of life which was instantly used to justify a continued presence.

Would true Afghan militants seeking to push NATO out of their country take out a large group of Special Forces troops just as withdrawal negotiations were underway?

Just like Israel blaming rocket attacks on Hamas earlier this month, this notion defies all logic and reason.

Before this recent attack on American troops, the deal was that the majority of American forces would withdraw leaving trainers to assist the local Afghan forces in their efforts.

The previous agreement entailed Americans handing over security to Kabul by the close of the year 2014; however, it now looks like they could tack another 10 years on to that deadline.

As I covered in my article about the black hole of war and the billions poured into these conflicts we can never expect to see back, our continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is not only detrimental to the countries which we occupy but also to the United States as a whole.

These imperialistic adventures drain the already crippled U.S. economy and further consolidate wealth into the hands of the ultra-rich elite who run the defense contracting corporations that are, at this point, inseparable from the Federal government.

As Russian Ambassador to Kabul aptly pointed out, “Afghanistan needs many other things apart from the permanent military presence of some countries. It needs economic help and it needs peace. Military bases are not a tool for peace.”

Indeed, and arming Afghani citizens to the teeth and training them to be brutal merciless killers is not going to help the peace process either. It will just pit the people of Afghanistan against each other, just as the West has always wanted.

Hamid Karzai’s top security adviser, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, supports the continued presence of American imperialists in his country, betraying not only his people, but the people of neighboring Pakistan and more remotely the United States as well.

He told The Daily Telegraph, “If [the Americans] provide us weapons and equipment, they need facilities to bring that equipment […] If they train our police and soldiers, then those trainers will not be 10 or 20, they will be thousands.”

He claims that since 2014 will not magically mark “the end of international terrorist networks”, the United States thus needs facilities to “fight them.”

He further alleges that the American-trained Afghan forces will still require air support from American fighter jets and attack helicopters to carry out their Taliban witch hunt.

He hilariously attempts to claim that the American presence would not be the same in the years after 2014, simply because they would not be granted their own bases. Instead, the United States would be classified as “a guest” on Afghan bases.

Obviously, Pakistan was opposed to the deal which is no deal at all and is nothing more than a semantic refurbishing of the occupation of Afghanistan.

The Taliban has made it clear that they will not come to the table with Karzai’s regime until all foreign troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan, and rightly so.

However, the deputy leader of the so-called “peace council” established by Karzai, Abdul Hakim Mujahid, believes that the Taliban are intensifying their insurgency in response to the American-Afghan “pact.”

He claims that “They want to put pressure on the world community and Afghan government”, even though the pressure has been there since day one when American and NATO troops were slaughtering women and children.

The pressure has been there since much of the world realized that this operation was going nowhere and the people of Afghanistan really were not interested in continuing to see their families blown up by remote-controlled Predator drones.

The mainstream media and the corrupt regimes of the world continue to pretend that the people of Afghanistan want and need us there to hold their hands and save them from the big bad Taliban bogeymen.

Similarly in Iraq, the United States has just worked out a deal with the puppet government to extend the deadline which would have forced American troops to withdraw at the end of this year.

While the United States officially announced this Friday, the Iraqi government claimed that the issue was still being negotiated, contrary to the words of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

Panetta told newspapers in the United States that the Iraqi government in Baghdad had “made up their mind to extend the presence of American troops.”

In contrast to the Iraqi administration’s claims, Panetta was quoted as saying, “My view is that they finally did say, ‘Yes,’” in Stars and Stripes.

The Iraqi premier denied Panetta’s account and the media advisor to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Ali Mussawi, told AFP that they “have not yet agreed on the issue of keeping training forces”.

For those not aware, in the politically correct military parlance parroted by the media, “training forces” is a nice way of saying Special Forces troops who instruct and train the Iraq military to bring about the brutal death and destruction that they specialize in.

When “trainers” appear, bad things start happening. Just look at the reports of Western Special Forces on the ground in Libya months ago. Soon after this was revealed, reports of rebel war crimes began to trickle through the cracks of the media whitewash.

The simple fact is, if Americans care even remotely about the well-being of people the world over, not to mention the stability of our economy here at home, they will refuse to support any continuation of the unnecessary and unjustifiable wars in the Middle East that serve only the banking cartels and defense contractors that make these conflicts possible.