Last Straw

Afgh­anistan is spun as a war we should be fight­ing.

In fact, a fact long for­got­ten by the West­ern media and oth­ers involved in the inva­sion of Afgh­anistan is that, on 14 Octo­ber, 2001, the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks:

In Jalalabad, deputy prime min­is­ter Haji Abdul Kabir — the third most power­ful fig­ure in the rul­ing Taliban regime — told report­ers that the Taliban would require evid­ence that bin Laden was behind the Septem­ber 11 ter­ror­ist attacks in the US, but added: “we would be ready to hand him over to a third country”.

But, in his usual pissing-in-the-wind style, Bush blew this oppor­tun­ity off, vow­ing to con­tinue the bomb­ing, adding:

There’s no need to dis­cuss inno­cence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.

Sub­sequently, Milton Bearden, a former CIA sta­tion chief who over­saw U.S. cov­ert oper­a­tions in Afgh­anistan in the 1980s, is repor­ted¹ to have this to say:

We never heard what they were try­ing to say. We had no com­mon lan­guage. Ours was, ‘Give up bin Laden.’ They were say­ing, ‘Do some­thing to help us give him up.’ … I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck.’

The Bush regime’s decision to con­tinue the bomb­ing put an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001 and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan, Iraq and the threat of inva­sion of Iran, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

Not a war we should be fight­ing. Just busi­ness as usual.

1. I had to link to a source other than the Wash­ing­ton Post as the Wash­ing­ton Post appears to have deleted that art­icle from their archive for whatever reason. [↩]