Analysis
The river of Afghan corruption and its American source
By Peter Chamberlin
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Sep 20, 2010, 00:13

The distinguished American ambassador glibly explains the unprecedented security situation in Afghanistan, blaming the entire mess upon the last 30 years without accepting US responsibility for causing it all.

We created the conflict in the first place, by bringing together the criminal enterprises of international arms dealers, opium suppliers, suitcases full of cash, and the most dangerous militants we could gather together from Africa and the Middle East into a �pipeline� which flowed into Afghanistan and from there throughout the region, before abandoning it all to start the first Iraq war. We �abandoned� the war and the Afghan and Pakistani people, but we left the pipeline intact, running at full capacity for the past thirty years.

Richard Holbrooke admitted that the core of the problem was the �huge amount of �international contracts,� particularly American military contracts which brought such a lucrative opportunity for . . . this kind of thing,� but he didn�t bother to mention that all of the contracts were initially American, or that the pipeline of weapons, drugs, and militants that supplied the materiel to the contractors, was our pipeline, or that it was still in operation. This is diplomatic deception of the highest order, meant to provide cover for a criminal war and the long-standing criminal American foreign policy which made it all possible.

This is the only real problem with Afghanistan, the fact that the governments which are waging war there are run by the same people who have created the dangerous situation to begin with. This is the only problem that affects everything else in the Afghan field of conflict. Cut the American/Pakistani pipeline and the war either ends outright, or slowly winds down, as the flow of money, weapons and foreign fighters simply dries-up, along with the Afghan opium trade which pays for it all.

In spite of intimate knowledge of all of this corruption we have sown, Holbrooke places the �cart before the horse,� claiming that the corruption is the problem, and not the deluge of cash, weapons and drugs which fuels the corruption. Without this enormous financial backing, the warlords and drug lords of Afghanistan would be �small potatoes.�

There is no limit to American hypocrisy or the galling nerve of American diplomats like Holbrooke, who front for the empire builders as we wage covert war upon the entire world and call it �foreign aid,� or promoting �democracy� or stability.