By
Sankar Ray
None other than Gen. Austin Miller,
the head of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission, stated ingenuously that in
Afghanistan “this is not going to be won militarily… This is going to a
political solution”. He put it bluntly that the USA and its armed collaborators
had failed to secure even their economic interests and instead murdered
thousands of people. As a result, the mess that they created over 16 years or
so, it will become extremely difficult for Afghanistan to come back to any kind
of normalcy in near future. The option
was to be out of Afghanistan. And as
soon as possible.
In a defeatist mood, the NATO’s
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and the acting Defense Secretary Patrick
Shanahan, also head of the Pentagon look up to the peace talks with the Taliban
in Afghanistan, albeit with guarded optimism about efforts to end the 17-year
war in the country. The two landed in Doha in January-end. The U.S. special
envoy for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad continues to voice a positive assessment
about five days of talks with Taliban negotiations there.
Things began to be frustrating for the
US-led NATO When the ISIS discreetly chipped in and used the same arms,
manufactured by 24 countries that it captured from the Iraqi and other forces.
A report by Conflict Armament Research said that some weapons bought by the
U.S. military in 2015 ended up in the hands of Islamic State fighters within
two months. “Under at least two different programs, the U.S. government has
supplied weapons to Syrian armed groups, first to fight the Assad regime and
then to assist the Syrian Democratic Forces in the fight against the Islamic
State. Some of ISIS’ weapons are also thought to have been pilfered from
military stockpiles while others were purchased illicitly”. Those ghosts from the past are the ones
haunting today. Politically, Kabul appears to be moving in a direction where
the forces that wanted Taliban out and considered it as their enemy have now
accepted its presence and inevitability. Taliban is being legitimised or has
forced powers to recognise it. Rather it is time to appreciate India’s
judicious endeavour for decades to promote democracy in Afghanistan.
An independent initiative, Other
Scripts, committed against neo-liberalism and awkward growth of crony
capitalism in a synoptic study, ‘Afghanistan: Can it emerge out of its darkness
with external assistance’, made revealing observations about disastrous
consequences of NATO’s hoary-headed policy of military interventionism in
Afghanistan.
The USA incurred a total expenditure
of $45 billion in 2018, – “$5 billion for Afghan forces and $13 billion for
U.S. forces inside Afghanistan. Much of the rest is for logistical support.
Some $780 million goes toward economic aid”. When it comes to spending, the
study notes, instead of safeguarding people, the weaponry that is used, is
produced somewhere and wherever it is produced, it generates a huge profit for
arms manufactures. A missile, a bomb, a rifle or a tank that is fired or
dropped in Afghanistan augments riches of private capital in United states.
“The biggest beneficiaries of Pentagon
largesse will, as always, be the major defense contractors like Lockheed
Martin, which received more than $36 billion in defense-related contracts in
fiscal 2015 (the most recent year for which full statistics are available). To
put that figure in perspective, Lockheed Martin’s federal contracts are now
larger than the budgets of 22 of the 50 states. The top 100 defense contractors
received $175 billion from the Pentagon in fiscal year 2015, nearly one-third
of the Department of Defense’s entire budget. These numbers will only grow if
Trump gets the money he wants to build more ships, planes, tanks, and nuclear
weapons”, the study noted.
A new class of nouveau riche emerged
in Afghanistan – coined by Other Scripts as ‘a New Corrupt Class: Ruling
through Proxy’. Someone like ‘Hikmatullah Shadman, an Afghan trucking-company
owner’, it cited, earned more than $ 160 million while contracting for the
United States military. His story was that from rags to riches”. Similarly,
another person, who began as an interpreter for the western forces, got into
trucking business as his contacts with them ripened. .Take Fahim Hashimy,
English language teacher who owned only a bicycle is now a millionaire and owns
a television company, logistics and construction companies as well as a
low-cost domestic airline.
Some warlords ostensibly took up
cudgels for freedom and mesmerised innocent ethnic youths to plunge into bloody
misadventures. Take Gul Agha Sherzai, the warlord who had retaken the province
with the help of the C.I.A. and Special Forces” became the Governor of
Kandahar. “…His brother Abdul Raziq was a general in the Afghan Army, in charge
of the airport. The Sherzai also controlled lucrative contracts to supply
gravel to the American base, and Raziq’s company, Sherzai Construction and
Supply, provided trucks to the Americans.” Americans had built an economy on
sub-contracting and “Between 2007 and 2014, the U.S. spent eighty-nine billion
dollars on contracting in Afghanistan”
The study infers, America and its
allies “have only acquired different weapons – from military stockpiles to the
power of media, which presents to the world what the powers that be, want to
project. The reality and truth have to be dealt with sceptically because the
way media presents it to us has been question many a times. A war, which began
with the farcical agenda of restoring democracy, could not do much to that
effect even after thousands and thousands died over a period of time. America
could neither achieve control over natural resources in Iraq nor could it win
the war. It created one after the other new ghosts with missiles, grenades and
automatic rifles, which came from nowhere else but from USA itself”.
Pentagon-NATO has finally conceded
defeat in Afghanistan. (IPA Service)
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