This piece describes the real cause of the chaos in Afghanistan. Nothing Biden has done, nor Trump. It was the overt criminality of the Bush Administration.

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The Taliban Surrendered in 2001

by

Richard W. Behan

At a U.S. Special Forces camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, on December 5, 2001, the Taliban offered an unconditional surrender. Furthermore, they would disband and disarm: a military force would no longer exist.

George W. Bush ignored the offer and continued attacking the Taliban until the end of his term. If only in self-defense the Taliban fought back, eventually regain ing the battlefield initiative. Barack Obama fought the Taliban for eight years more. Donald Trump did so for the next four.

T wenty years later, after the squandering of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, President Biden withdrew American troops from Afghanistanand drew angry criticism for the chao tic exit that followed.

How perverse we have become. We chastise President Biden for a messy ending of the war in Afghanistan and fail to indict George Bush for its illegal beginning.

George Bush launched a war for oil and empire, invading two sovereign nations without provocatio n. He violated international law .

Within ten days of taking office the Bush Administration formalized a decision to invade Iraq.¹Long before 9/11 the attack on Afghanistan was scheduled .² Neither proposed incursion had the slightest thing to do with terrorism: the objectives were preemptive access to Iraqi oil and a pipeline right-of-way across Afghanistan for the Unocal Corporation . 9/11 offered a spectacular and fortuitous covering alibi ; President Bush declar ed a "war on terrorism " and launched his premeditated wars . ³

Osama bin Laden was portrayed as an iconic terrorist, to be apprehended for his orchestration of 9/11. But George Bush from his first day in office, January 20, 2001, could have negotiated with the Taliban to assassinate Osama bin Laden or to surrender him into U.S. custody. That was the standing offer the Taliban tendered in late 2000, seeking to retain U.S. favor after bin Laden bombed theU.S.S. Cole. The Bush Administration refused the offer, four times prior to 9/11 and once more five days later.⁴

Saddam Hussein was said to be an intolerable terrorist threat, too. "Regime change" was necessary to remove him from power. In February of 2003, Saddam Hussein offered to enter voluntary exile in Turkey, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. Here was "regime change" handed on a plat t e r to George Bush, but a peaceful one. The offer was brushed aside ."⁵

George Bush needed terrorists, alive, at large, and in residence in Afghanistan and Iraq, to make his"war on terrorism" credible.

The pipeline project was the first order of business. On October 7, 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was underway, but the billions of barrels of Iraqi oil were never far from mind. Seven weeks later, onNovember 27, 2001, the President ordered his Defense Department to plan the invasion of Iraq.⁶(That was eleven months before Congress would authorize it.)

The aggressions were titanic failures. Yes, a few American oil companies operate in Iraq today, but they are barely visible among scores of other firms from Egypt, Italy, Japan, France, Austria, the UK, Canada, Hungary, India, Norway, and the holders of the largest contracts by far, Russia and China.⁷

Afghanistan lies in a state of seething chaos. There will be no American pipeline across the country: twenty years of staggering costs in lives and treasure for nothing.

Those costs might have been avoided : violence in Afghanistan could have ended two months after George Bush turned it loose.

Anand Gopal, an American journalist, tells the story with unusual authority. He moved to Afghanistan in 2008, learned the language, and f or four years he travelled the country freely.

His book appeared in 2014: No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.

It relates the Taliban's surrender:

His back to the wall, Mullah Omar [leader of the Taliban] drew up a letter to Hamid Karzai, acknowledging his selection as interim president. The letter also granted Omar's ministers, deputies, and aides the right to surrender.

...On December 5 [2001] a Taliban delegation arrived at the US special forces camp north of Kandahar city to officially relinquish power...[The Taliban]...pledged to retire from politics and return to their home villages. Crucially, they also agreed that their movement would surrender arms, effectively ensuring the Taliban could no longer function as a military entity. There would be no jihad, no resistance from the Taliban to the new order... ⁸

Another description of the surrender , differing little, appeared seven years later:

It took barely two months after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 for the United States mission to point itself toward defeat.

"Tomorrow the Taliban will start surrendering their weapons," the Taliban's spokesman Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef announced on Decembe r 7 , 2001. "I think we should go home." But the United States r efused the group's surrender, vowing to fight on to shatter the Taliban's influence in every corner of the country. ⁹

(A contemporaneous report in a UK newspaper that same day told of the surrender, but not the subsequent rejection. See "Taliban Surrender in Kandahar," The Guardian, December 7, 2001.)

Accepting the surrender would have denoted a great victory in the "war on terrorism." But George Bush was fighting a war for oil and empire, and vi ctory would pose a huge tactical difficulty: with no enemy to fight he would have to demobilize h is forces in the Mideast and bring them home. That he could not tolerate: the great prize, the Iraqi oil, had yet to be won, so the fighting in the Mideast would have to be sustained as a "war on terrorism"--- until the invasion of Iraq could be planned, authorized by Congress, and sold to the American people. The Taliban's offer was simply dismissed, and the fighting continuedfor twenty years.

And now President Biden has called a halt in Afghanistan , in humiliating defeat. The Taliban, who once offered to disarm and disband , have taken control of Afghanistan.

The national media acknowledge the defeat, but trumpet "the end of America's longest war" as recompense. That is grossly misleading : American military violence rages on in the "war on terrorism ." U.S. combat troops remain stationed in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Djibouti, Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, the Philippines, and Cyprus, and we conduct counterterrorism operations in 61 additional countries around the world.¹⁰

This madness is the legacy of the Bush Administration , and successive presidents have done nothing to end it. Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is a n o- brainer tactical retreat, but George Bush's bogus war plunges mindlessly ahead.

President Biden, carpe diem. Call th e "war on terrorism" for the fraud it is and end it. Bring all the troops home, from everywhere.

1 See, Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, New York: Simon and S c huster, 2004, p. 86

2See "US planned war in Afghanistan long before 9/11," by Patrick Martin, World Socialist Website, November 20, 2001, and "U.S. Planned Attack on Taleban," by George Arney, BBC News, September 18, 2001.

3This history is recounted in a book the author is completing, entitled Fraud and Apocalypse: the Backstory of George Bush's War on Terrorism. Every detail of the story is documented.

4The definitive source is the memoir of Kabir Mohabbat, the Afghan-American courier sent by the State Department to deliver the sequential refusals. See Delivering Osama: The Story of America's Secret Envoy, by Kabir Mohabbat and Leah McInnis, Berlin: First Draft Publishing,2020. Dozens of other references to the episode appear in the periodical literature. See, for example, "How Bush Was Offered bin Laden and Blew It," by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, November 1, 2004, and "Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Hand bin Laden Over," UK Guardian Unlimited, October 14, 2001.

5See "Report Says Hussein Was Open to Exile Before 2003 Invasion," by Karen DeYoung and Michael Abramovitz, Washington Post, September 27, 2007. See also, "Saddam ready to go into exile; Diplomats' proposal in a few days," anon. Dawn, (a Pakistani English language newspaper), January 17, 2003.

6See Andrew Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East, New York, Random House, 2016,p. 231.

7 See the Iraq Business News website at www.iraq-businessnews.com/list-of-international-oil-companies, and Ga ry Vogler, Iraq and the Politics of Oil, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. p.259

8 See, Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living , New York: Picador, 2014. p 47.

9 S ee " The Contradiction That Doomed America's Mission in Afghanistan," by Max Fisher, New York Times, May 9, 2021

10 See Tom Eng el hardt, "Mapping a World From Hell," LeMonde diplomatique, January 18, 2018

Richard Behan lives and writes in Corvallis, Oregon. Since 2002 he has contributed 60- some essays criticizing the Bush Administration's wars to ten different progressive websites. In 2016 his powerpoint presentation The Fraudulent War was featured in CodePink's "People's Tribunal on the Iraq War." He is completing a book summarizing his work, entitled Fraud and Apocalypse: the Backstory of George Bush's War on Terrorism.

(Article changed on Aug 22, 2021 at 6:32 PM EDT)

Authors Bio:

Retired professor of public policy and administration. Author, frequent contributor to progressive websites.