Special Forces, Pentagon Contractors and Intelligence Operatives Will Remain
by Jeremy Kuzmarov
Part 3 - What Uncle Sam Really Wants in Afghanistan
Republican war hawk James Inhofe (R-OK) lambasted Biden’s withdrawal plan, stating that this was a “reckless and dangerous decision. Arbitrary deadlines would likely put our troops in danger, jeopardize all the progress we’ve made, and lead to civil war in Afghanistan—and create a breeding ground for international terrorists.”
Inhofe’s assessment is flawed because, among other reasons, the U.S. has not made much progress in 19 years of war—the Taliban, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, is stronger than at any point since 2001 and controls about one fifth of Afghanistan—and Afghanistan was never really a breeding ground for international terrorists. The 9/11 hijackers mostly came from Saudi Arabia and the Taliban agreed to turn over Osama Bin Laden to an international court after the 9/11 attacks, which they never supported.
The Afghan War will go on indefinitely not because of the threat of terrorism—which is accentuated by the U.S. military presence—but because the United States will not concede ground in the Middle East.
The U.S. has announced intentions to retain at least two military bases in Afghanistan after the official troop drawdown, and set up over one thousand bases during the war.
Uncle Sam also covets Afghans mineral wealth. A 2007 United States Geological Service survey discovered nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits, including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium, which is used in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and blackberries. An internal Pentagon memo stated that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”
In 2001, when the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan, it was in the process of expanding its military infrastructure in Central Asia. Afghanistan provided a key way-station to this new “oil dorado,” which holds as much as 200 billion barrels of oil—about ten times the amount found in the North Sea, and a third of the Persian Gulf’s total reserves.
Afghanistan was further valued at the time as a key location for an oil pipeline that would transport Central Asian oil to the Indian Ocean while bypassing Russia.
In the 1990s, the Southern California oil company, Unocal, began taking steps to build the pipeline, even courting the Taliban. In 2018, ground was broken on a new pipeline project backed by the United States that will carry oil from Turkmenistan to northern India.
The U.S. ruling establishment’s greatest fear is that a complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan might result in the U.S. losing a strategic foothold to its main geopolitical rivals, China and Russia, in Afghanistan.
China has recently increased its trade and investment in Afghanistan—with which it shares a border—and has sought to cultivate better relations with the Afghan government and Taliban.
Russia, meanwhile, reopened a cultural center in Kabul in 2014, rebuilt an abandoned Soviet friendship center, expanded its embassy staff, expanded economic investment, and provided 10,000 Kalashnikov rifles to the Afghan government. It also supported Afghan housing projects and took advantage of contacts in Kabul to renew ties with ethnic power brokers in the North while quietly courting the Taliban.
As a previous CAM article documented, the current Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani is largely a creation of the United States. Its military is funded by the United States at a cost of around $4 billion per year. This support is going to continue—unless Congress cuts it off—alongside large-scale U.S. foreign aid programs that amount to nearly one billion per year.
The U.S. wants to keep Ghani in power, or replace him with another proxy that can help it win the geopolitical competition with Russia and China, which is little different from the 19th century “great game” between Great Britain and Russia.
As long as the U.S. empire remains intact, the war as such will go on, and on—and on.
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