Published on
Thursday, April 15, 2021
byCommon Dreams
Contrary to What Biden Said, US Warfare in Afghanistan Is Set to Continue
No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won't
stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the
bombing and "special operations" that remain shrouded in secrecy.
byNorman Solomon
Guljumma, 7, and her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, at the Helmand Refugee Camp
District 5 in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2009. (Photo: Reese Erlich)
Guljumma, 7, and her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, at the Helmand Refugee Camp
District 5 in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2009. (Photo: Reese Erlich)
When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a
dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she
slept at home in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Valley. With a soft,
matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her
family died. She lost an arm.
Troops on the ground didn't kill Guljumma's relatives and leave her to live
with only one arm. The U.S. air war did.
There's no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over
when-according to President Biden's announcement on Wednesday-all U.S.
forces will be withdrawn from that country.
What Biden didn't say was as significant as what he did say. He declared
that "U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO allies and
operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan" before Sept. 11. And "we
will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily."
But President Biden did not say that the United States will stop bombing
Afghanistan. What's more, he pledged that "we will keep providing assistance
to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces," a declaration that
actually indicates a tacit intention to "stay involved in Afghanistan
militarily."
And, while the big-type headlines and prominent themes of media coverage are
filled with flat-out statements that the U.S. war in Afghanistan will end
come September, the fine print of coverage says otherwise.
The banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage during
much of Wednesday proclaimed: "Withdrawal of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Will
End Longest American War." But, buried in the thirty-second paragraph of a
story headed "Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept.
11," the Times reported: "Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the
United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine
Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence
operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State
threats, current and former American officials said."
Matthew Hoh, a Marine combat veteran who in 2009 became the highest-ranking
U.S. official to resign from the State Department in protest of the
Afghanistan war, told my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy on
Wednesday: "Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave
Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of
thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan,
through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed
on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of
cruise missiles on ships and submarines."
We scarcely hear about it, but the U.S. air war on Afghanistan has been a
major part of Pentagon operations there. And for more than a year, the U.S.
government hasn't even gone through the motions of disclosing how much of
that bombing has occurred.
"We don't know, because our government doesn't want us to," diligent
researchers Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote last month. "From
January 2004 until February 2020, the U.S. military kept track of how many
bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published
those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily
available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump
administration abruptly stopped publishing U.S. Airpower Summaries, and the
Biden administration has so far not published any either."
The U.S. war in Afghanistan won't end just because President Biden and U.S.
news media tell us so. As Guljumma and countless other Afghan people have
experienced, troops on the ground aren't the only measure of horrific
warfare.
No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won't
stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the
bombing and "special operations" that remain shrouded in secrecy.
