14 Years Later, What Was Liberated in Afghanistan? - Tom Engelhardt

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
In October 2001, the U.S. launched its invasion of Afghanistan largely through proxy Afghan fighters with the help of Special Operations forces, American air power, and CIA dollars. The results were swift and stunning. The Taliban was whipped, a new government headed by Hamid Karzai soon installed in Kabul, and the country declared "liberated."

More than 14 years later, how'd it go? What's "liberated" Afghanistan like and, if you were making a list, what would be the accomplishments of Washington all these years later? 

Hmm... at this very moment, according to the latest reports, the Taliban control more territory than at any moment since December 2001. Meanwhile, the Afghan security forces that the U.S. built up and funded to the tune of more than $65 billionare experiencing "unsustainable" casualties, their ranks evidently filled with "ghost" soldiers and policemen -- up to 40% in some places -- whose salaries, often paid by the U.S., are being pocketed by their commanders and other officials. In 2015, according to the U.N., Afghan civilian casualties were, for the seventh year in a row, atrecord levels. Add to all this the fact that American soldiers, their "combat mission"officially concluded in 2014, are now being sent by the hundreds back into the fray (along with the U.S. Air Force) to support hard-pressed Afghan troops in a situation which seems to be fast "deteriorating."

Oh, and economically speaking, how did the "reconstruction" of the country work out, given that Washington pumped more money (in real dollars) into Afghanistan in these years than it did into the rebuilding of Western Europe after World War II? Leaving aside the pit of official corruption into which many of those dollars disappeared, the country is today hemorrhaging desperate young people who can't find jobs or make a living and now constitute what may be the second largest contingent of refugees heading for Europe.

As for that list of Washington's accomplishments, it might be accurate to say that only one thing was "liberated" in Afghanistan over the last 14-plus years and that was, as Alfred McCoy points out in "How a Pink Flower Defeated the World's Sole Superpower," the opium poppy. It might also be said that, with the opium trade now fully embedded in both the operations of the Afghan government and of the Taliban, Washington's single and singular accomplishment in all its years there has been to oversee the country's transformation into the planet's number one narco-state. McCoy, who began his career in the Vietnam War era by writing The Politics of Heroin, a now-classic book on the CIA and the heroin trade (that the Agency tried to suppress) and who has written on the subject of drugs and Afghanistan before for this site, now offers a truly monumental look at opium and the U.S. from the moment this country's first Afghan War began in 1979 to late last night. - Read More at the Huffingtonpost

14 Years Later, What Was Liberated in Afghanistan?

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