View: The Afghan war and Mr Biden | Economic Times

Here are a few questions I have for you on behalf of my close Afghan friends, colleagues and their families who are stuck in different corners of Afghanistan today. As the ‘leader of the free world’, you may have the podium to tell the world that the Afghans should fight their own war and Americans cannot be there forever. But the Afghans were fighting a war for four decades because the US was there to start it.When the Soviet Union physically got involved in the internal matters of Afghanistan by sending in ground troops in 1979, your country saw a chance to bleed it. Zbigniew Brzezinski, then US national security advisor, sent the famous memo to President Jimmy Carter: ‘We now have the excellent opportunity to give the USSR their own Vietnam War.’ But months before Soviet troops rolled into Afghanistan on December 24, and before he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter approved clandestine CIA operations in Afghanistan on July 3, 1979, to aid the mujahideen forces opposed to the communist government in Kabul.In an interview in 1988, Brzezinski admitted that they had hoped that CIA operations would draw the Soviet Union in the Afghan battle theatre. Which ultimately happened, and about the ‘brilliance’ of which he gloated. So, Mr President, please do not try to convince the world that the Afghans started the war, and as the saviour of the Afghan people, your predecessors involved your military to fight the longest war abroad.Mr President, the Afghans did not start any international jihad either. Supported by your foreign policy of the time, the CIA played the role of the midwife of international jihad. Your spies facilitated the influx of uneducated, or little-educated youths from Muslim countries like Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Uzbekistan and north African states to fight a ‘holy war’ to ‘save Islam’ in Afghanistan against the ‘godless communists’. Their brainwashing happened through the Saudi Wahabi and Salafi preachers.They were camped in the seminaries in the tribal areas of Pakistan. They had unending supply of arms from the military-industry of your country, and paid for by your taxpayers. Therefore, Mr President, your country created a monster, and the Afghans continued to pay for your foreign policy objectives with their lives.The US mainstream media, too, legitimised and valourised your country’s involvement there, with films like Charlie Wilson’s War, and a host of absurd ‘based-on-real-events’ films like Rambo II, 12 Strong and Lone Survivor. These convinced the Americans and the world oblivious of the history of the US policies in the region that it was the ‘barbarian’ Afghans who were simply fighting a religious war.Volumes of research on how the CIA helped to form, finance and create safe havens for non-Afghan jihadi groups in its war against communism in Afghanistan have come out. Mr President, after fulfilling its objective of defeating the Soviet Union, and following its demise in 1991, the US simply turned its back on Afghanistan and left its 30 million people at the mercy of warlords and foreign jihadists armed to the teeth by your supply lines.So, when the Taliban came to power in 1996 for the first time, the US did not bat an eyelid — until al-Qaeda, sheltered by the Taliban, reached your shores in 2001. At that point, the US acted again — this time to exact revenge on al-Qaeda but couching its intentions with the PR message of bringing freedom to the Afghan people, particularly the women and girls who had been brutalised by the Taliban for five long years.Mr President, the US finally got Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 — and you failed to lay your hands on Afghanistan’s recently found mineral resources, which the Chinese had been also eyeing at. So, you leave, throwing ordinary Afghans to the wolves again, pretending that it was the ‘war between Afghans’ in which the US had no role. At least have the honesty and say that you have the might, and you can do whatever you want, anywhere. That would, at least, make sense