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To borrow Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, the Taliban is not a terrorist organization, but a movement attempting to unify Afghanistan and the “war on terror” is a hoax that fronts for American control of oil pipelines, the profits of the military-security complex, the assault on civil liberty by fomenters of a police state, and Israel’s territorial expansion.
So the war in Afghanistan led by the United State is more than just a war against ‘terrorism.’ Beneath the rhetoric of US officials to smash the so-called Al Quida network led by Osama bin Laden in the name of ‘freedom and civilization’ lies a deeper and far-reaching reason: Central Asia’s oil and gas reserves and other natural resources.
Afghanistan, which virtually has no oil reserves, has long had a key place in US plans to secure control of the vast but landlocked oil and gas reserves of Central Asia that has the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. The US has been endeavoring to fill the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution in order to assert Washington's domination over the region.
As the Afghan war continues for the last seven years without much success, the US Army is asking 30,000 more troops but Obama last Tuesday authorized sending 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. The proposed surge in U.S. troops will bring the total to 60,000, while the combined forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), including troops from Germany, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, amount to over 32,000. When in full strength, U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan could reach close to 100,000 by the end of this year.
The US is currently building eight new major bases in southern Afghanistan for the prolonged war which has already been dubbed by the embedded experts of the semi-official think tank, Rand Corporation, as a long war.
So Obama’s change will not bring any positive change for the people of Afghanistan or the neighboring Pakistan where US drone missile attacks on targets in FATA region continue to kill people causing more anti-American sentiments and weakening the civilian government in Islamabad. Similarly in the Middle East, the US brands Hamas and Hezbollah “terrorist organizations” for no other reason than the US is on Israel’s side of the conflict. Hezbollah represents the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon, another area in the Middle East that Israel seeks for its territorial expansion. Hamas is the democratically elected government of Gaza. In an effort to bring Hamas under Israeli hegemony, Israel employs terror bombing and assassinations against Palestinians. The December/January US-backed 22-day Israeli carnage in Gaza massacred about 1400 Palestinians, of whom 412 were children and a hundred were women. More than 5,000 were injured, 1,855 of whom were children and 795 were women, according to UN sources. Hamas replies to the Israeli terror with homemade and ineffectual rockets. The homemade rockets are little more than a sign of defiance. If Hamas were armed by Iran as Israel claims, its assault on Gaza would have cost Israel its helicopter gunships, its tanks, and hundreds of lives of its soldiers. Hamas is a small organization armed with small caliber rifles incapable of penetrating body armor. Hamas is unable to stop small bands of Israeli settlers from descending on West Bank Palestinian villages, driving out the Palestinians, and appropriating their land. Tellingly, after 60 years, Palestinians remained unarmed with the complicity of US client Arab governments. As Paul Craig said, the unsupported assertion that Iran supplies sophisticated arms to the Palestinians is like the unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. “These assertions are propagandistic justifications for killing Arab civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in order to secure US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.” Hence, the United States law and justice will continue to be seen through the Bush-era lens of the so-called "War on Terror," long after Bush’s departure. In fact, according to the Attorney General Eric Holder, not only are we at war now, we were at war before September 2001 (as evidenced by the attacks on the USS Cole and on American embassies abroad) -- we just "did not realize we were at war." (Senate Judiciary Committee hearing of January 15, 2009) Justice department embraces Bush Polices on Afghan detainees. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended on February 20 that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights. In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The Supreme Court last summer gave al-Qaida and Taliban suspects held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention. With about 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and thousands more held in Iraq, courts are grappling with whether they, too, can sue to be released. Three months after the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo Bay, four Afghan citizens being detained at Bagram tried to challenge their detentions in U.S. District Court in Washington. Court filings alleged that the U.S. military had held them without charges, repeatedly interrogating them without any means to contact an attorney. The military has determined that all the detainees at Bagram are "enemy combatants."
Hamas and Hezbollah.
