David Ray Griffin

I wish to thank Tod Fletcher and Elizabeth Woodworth for considerable help with this essay.

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be "Obama's Vietnam."1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the "lessons of Vietnam"? The US government learned one: If you're going to fight unpopular wars, don't have a draft hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.

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Marc W. Herold

A child killed in recent airstrikes, western Afghanistan

“The American public is conditionally tolerant of [military] casualties and consistently indifferent to collateral damage.” ~Dr. Karl P. Mueller, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base

"General McChrystal’s data provided an opportunity to reveal Pentagon lying (or incompetence) to all, but only the libertarians rose to the occasion. The mainstream U.S media, Obama cultists, and much of the U.S antiwar movement persist in blithely quoting UNAMA and consuming Pentagon and embedded “patriotic” U.S reporters’ characterizations of America’s War in Afghanistan."

The Politics of Counting Dead Afghan Civilians: Responses by the Libertarian Right and Obama Liberals to McChrystal’s Numbers.

The ever-so-faithful stenographer of Pentagon truths, USA Today, printed numbers put forth by General McChrystal on Afghan civilians who perished at the hands of NATO.[1] The article headlined “NATO Strikes Killing More Afghan Civilians,” noted that such deaths rose from 29 during the first three months of 2009, to 72 during 2010.

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Marc W. Herold

KANDAHAR, Aug 5, 2009 : Villagers look at the bodies of three
children after they were killed in an airstrike by foreign troops in
Arghandab district of Kandahar, south of Kabul, on Wednesday.
Four local civilians including three children were killed in the last
night bombing. (Photo: PAN/Bashir Nadim)

What needs first to be clearly understood is that is that Obama’s Pentagon has been much more deadly for Afghan civilians than was Bush in comparable months of 2008.

Buried in the public relations blather of U.S. Marine legions “liberating” Helmand and Afghan (sham) “elections” as democracy-restored (1) is an unspoken trade-off over who disproportionately dies in America’s modern wars in the Third World. Under George W. Bush, U.S politico-military elites chose to fight the Afghan war with minimal regard for so-called collateral casualties. But the soaring toll of killed Afghan civilians swayed world public opinion and stoked the Afghan resistance as grieved Afghan family members sought revenge. Enter Barack Obama. Faced with the prospect of NATO forces being withdrawn as restless NATO country citizens mobilized against the war, the Obama war machine took the decision to trade-off (mostly) lower-class U.S. “volunteer” soldiers from rural America (2) for fewer rural Afghan civilians killed. The decision had nothing to do with valuing Afghan lives and everything to do with a careful political calculation. In outlying areas such as in the Pakistan borderlands or in isolated rural areas of Afghanistan, Obama’s war machine cavalierly slaughters innocent civilians with the same impunity and at the same rate as his maligned predecessor did as drone strikes in Pakistan and U.S air strikes in Farah and Logar have demonstrated.

What has also changed is the public face of the war as one might expect from a President skilled in diction and possessed with the persuasion skills of a well-trained lawyer. On the other hand, behind the soothing words, the rationales are identical: in Phoenix recently, Obama reiterated the Bush of September 2001,

"This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. This is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.” (3)

So much for the current U.S. rationale for war. So much for “Change We Can Believe In.”

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08/18/09 Eric Margolis The US Denounces Iran While running fake elections in Afghanistan
08/18/09 Chris Floyd The Gadarene Gambit: Surging Over the Cliff in Afghanistan
08/20/09 Pepe Escobar The Afghan pipe dream
08/28/09 Patrick Martin Washington’s double standard: The elections in Iran and Afghanistan
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10/22/09 Eric S. Margolis Flames From Afghanistan Ignite Pakistan
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11/04/09 Malalai Joya Speech of Malalai Joya: No nation can liberate another
11/05/09 Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Why the UN is so disturbed at the Murder of the Western Nationals?
11/05/09 William Bowles The nerve of these guys! Karzai 'wins' anyway
11/06/09 William Bowles Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires or just a graveyard with a pipeline running through it?
11/06/09 Gwynne Dyer Last Exit From Afghanistan
11/12/09 Christopher King The Afghanistan war on Remembrance Sunday
11/17/09 Pepe Escobar UNDER THE AFPAK VOLCANO: Welcome to Pashtunistan
11/23/09 Olivia Ward 'Liberation was just a big lie'
11/24/09 Eric S. Margolis The Pot Calls The Kettle Black
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12/03/09 Stephen Lendman Obamathink on Afghanistan: Escalate to Exit
12/03/09 Justin Raimondo Obama’s War Speech: An Unconvincing Flop
12/11/09 William Blum The Anti-Empire Report -Yeswecanistan
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01/02/10 Peter Dale Scott Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War
01/08/10 What Really Happened Afghan My Lai Massacre
01/20/10 Jeremy Scahill Blackwater Wants to Surge its Armed Force in Afghanistan
01/21/10 Jeffrey Kaye Afghanistan: Women Dying and Torture Run Amuck
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02/28/10 Gwynne Dyer Afghanistan guerrilla war will have a predictable result
02/02/10 Anand Gopal Terror comes at night in Afghanistan
02/03/10 Mehdi Hasan Malalai Joya Intervieved by Mehdi Hasan
02/03/10 Nick Turse Drone surge: Today, tomorrow and 2047
02/15/10 Johann Hari Obama's secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all
02/15/10 Chris Floyd The Last Station: Surging Into the Savage Past in Afghanistan
02/17/10 Chris Floyd All Systems Go: No Disfunction in Profitable Afghan Enterprise
02/17/10 Chris Floyd Collateral Accumulation: Passing on the Abiding Wisdom of Empire
02/20/10 David Lindorff Battle for Marjah: The US has Already Lost
02/21/10 Christopher King Dutch government falls over Afghanistan
02/24/10 Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Marjah Operations are an Exemplary Lesson for the Invaders
02/24/10 Chris Floyd Many Thousand Gone
02/28/10 Gwynne Dyer Afghanistan guerrilla war will have a predictable result
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03/07/10 James Lucas Destroying Afghanistan
03/09/10 Gareth Porter Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War
03/12/10 Chris Floyd Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion
03/16/10 David Lindorff This Time It's Pregnant Women: Another US Atrocity in the Bush-Obama War in Afghanistan
03/20/10 Chris Floyd Night Riders: Afghan Atrocity and American Values
03/27/10 Chris Floyd An Unaccustomed Truth: American Commander Admits Afghan Atrocities
03/30/10 Rethink Afghanistan NATO Tries to Silence a Truth-Teller in Afghanistan After Killing Pregnant Women
03/30/10 Bill Van Auken Obama’s visit underscores US crisis in Afghanistan
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04/01/10 Richard North "We will not prevail in Afghanistan"
04/03/10 Victor Korgun The Afghan dilemma
04/06/10 Stephen Lendman US-Committed Atrocities in Afghanistan
04/06/10 Tom Eley US Special Forces covered up massacre of Afghans
04/06/10 Stephen Lendman US-Committed Atrocities in Afghanistan
04/14/10 Marc W. Herold Obama’s Unspoken Trade-Off: Dead US/NATO Occupation Troops versus Dead Afghan Civilians?
04/16/10 The Anti Press Special Forces Death Squads in Afghanistan
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