America's Endless War: what was it all about? Middle Nation Podcast (E:9)

Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wa barakatu, everyone. This is Shahid Bolson. Welcome to another edition of the Middle Nation podcast. This is episode number nine. Let's talk a little bit about Afghanistan.

Someone in the comment section actually asked me to analyze or discuss, Afghanistan over the last forty years or so, but that's a bit much. So let me just talk a little bit about more recent history and maybe what we can expect in the at least short to medium future. Talking about the recent history of Afghanistan means, of course, that we are talking about the invasion, occupation, and war by The United States, and, of course, their withdrawal a couple of months back after twenty years. So what was all that about? First, let's talk about what it wasn't about.

It was not about killing or capturing Osama bin Laden. It wasn't about destroying the Taliban, and it wasn't about spreading democracy and freedom in Afghanistan. I think it's safe to assume that most of us know this already. However, many people, particularly Muslims, think that the war and occupation in Afghanistan was about geostrategic control over historically important territory on the old Silk Road. They will invoke the great game narrative and, you know, something something oil and gas pipelines, something something China.

Or maybe they'll talk about the, 1 to $3,000,000,000,000 worth of minerals, rare earths, gems, gold, coal, and so on hiding in the soils of Afghanistan, making the war a simple land grab for precious resources, which is something that everyone can understand very easily. But I'm here to tell you that none of that has anything to do with the war. Not really. All of that constitutes the contrivances of think tanks and pundits to make it look like the invasion and occupation were somehow politically justifiable from a neo imperialist perspective. That is to make a convincing argument that controlling Afghanistan was by one way or another useful to The United States as a nation.

Either it was vital from a geostrategic point of view or else it was a maneuver that would secure The US access to a treasure trove of raw minerals and natural wealth. Well, the truth is Afghanistan is irrelevant, and that is why The US declared an endless war against it. It was an impoverished, undeveloped, and undevelopable, defenseless, landlocked country in which nothing of consequence was at stake. It was perfect. Let me explain.

The budget for American defense spending, that is money spent by The United States to finance research and development and acquisition of technologies from American defense and aerospace companies, rose steadily for three decades during the Cold War. In the nineteen nineties, it plateaued for ten years. By 1999, funding for r and d and procurement were in real terms actually less than half what they were in 1985. By the year 2000, military spending in The United States was at its lowest point ever as a percentage of GDP. The defense industry then appears to have made a business decision.

They increased their political spending, backing George w Bush in the two thousand presidential election with more contributions than they had ever given any candidate before. In fact, their financial support for the Bush campaign was almost triple what they had spent in the 1996 campaign of Bob Dole. They also drastically increased their spending on lobbying and funding for congressional candidates, investing over $10,000,000 more in lobbying in 2000 than they had four years before. This bought them in 2000 a very accommodating government, and war was an inevitability with or without the nine eleven attacks. And again, Afghanistan was the perfect target.

Not only was it perfect because it did not matter, but it also did not matter to anyone else who did matter. The war could indeed be endless. It provided the optimal vehicle for funneling public money, taxpayer money, to the defense industry, and it could go on indefinitely with little or no serious consequences or disruption to other American interests. And that's precisely what happened. Whenever commentators talk about how much the war in Afghanistan cost, it is highly misleading because almost all of that money is money gifted to American companies.

Companies like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, all of which have enjoyed astronomical profits over the past twenty years of the war in Afghanistan. The defense industry was insulated from the two thousand and eight global financial crisis and has been unaffected by the economic downturn from the pandemic. They have wildly outperformed every other sector on the stock market by 60%. The war has been an enormous success. The only way for you to believe that it was a failure is if you made the mistake of believing any of the official rationales for the war crafted by think tanks, pundits and politicians.

The defense industry has had a bull run of unprecedented profits for twenty years, but all good things must come to an end, and other power players have emerged to exert their influence. 2021 is not like 2000. Big pharma is now the largest lobbying spender in Washington. The pharmaceutical industry gave Joe Biden's campaign for president nearly three times as much in 2020 as they had given Hillary Clinton in 2016, which is also three times more than the defense industry gave Biden in 2020. Big Pharma has also ramped up their investment in lobbyists for influence in congress as well, spending nearly $20,000,000 to finance congressional candidates in 2020.

Accordingly, there is a shift in the policy focus, particularly when you consider also the massive amount of money poured into Washington by big tech, a category that includes Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and other Internet and media giants. Biden received nearly $55,000,000 more from this sector than he did from the arms industry and aerospace. So what about Afghanistan since The US has ceased using it as a vehicle for pumping money into American defense companies? Well, here, let me address the claim of the 1 to $3,000,000,000,000 worth of natural resources laying untapped under the soil in Afghanistan. This was a story that made the rounds back in 2010 when majority public opinion had turned against the war.

The front page of the New York Times excitedly reported that the Pentagon and a team of geologists had suddenly discovered that Afghanistan was poised to become the Saudi Arabia of lithium and contained an unimaginable wealth of precious minerals. The fact is this discovery was not a new story at all nor was it a discovery. The American claim was based on an old Russian report from 1977 which had been twice updated by the US Geological Survey first in 2004 and then again in 2009. The findings were not findings as such, but they were, quote unquote, probabilistic estimates of undiscovered deposits, which is to say, there was zero actual confirmation that this subterranean wealth really exists. Look.

After twenty years of military occupation, there is not one single American or western mining company in Afghanistan. As vital as the alleged mineral wealth is, if it was really there, private military contractors would have been doing nothing for the last ten years except for securing the operations of extraction companies, and we'd be reading stories about Afghani children forced to work in mines. As it is, only one international mining contract was ever signed during the occupation, and that was with China. This was touted at the time as the biggest deal ever for a copper mining operation reported to be worth $2,800,000,000. Okay.

The actual agreement, not as reported in the press, but the actual agreement was only for $800,000,000 over a thirty year contract, but that project has been suspended. But, of course, since The US has left and the Taliban has taken over, the stories about the mythical mineral wealth are once again reappearing in the headlines. This time accompanied by predictions that China will seize Afghanistan's treasures. Now the propaganda about Afghani minerals made sense a decade ago as a way to justify the occupation and bolster lagging public support for the war, while also distracting from the real function of the occupation as a mechanism for funneling taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the defense industry. But what purpose does it serve to talk about it now?

Part of this may be wishful thinking on the part of the Americans, hoping that the Chinese, since they are the only ones to ever actually enter into a mining agreement with Afghanistan, might be lured into the quagmire of exploration and extraction in Afghanistan that The US already knows is a losing game. It's a losing game because number one, no one even knows if this hypothetical mineral wealth actually exists. And number two, because if it does exist, extracting any of it will be a security and logistical nightmare, pursuit of which could do considerable damage to China, both domestically and around the region. But more likely, this is getting reported for no other reason than to boost the idea in The US that China is on the verge of world domination. This is more likely because we should always remember that the primary target audience for any country's mainstream media is the domestic population of that country.

The US, no doubt, would like to see Afghanistan return at this point to being a destabilizing force in Central Asia, a launching pad for extremism and violence and a source of refugees. They would very much like to see China attempt to pursue infrastructure projects and mining in Afghanistan, would inevitably require China to become involved in the mission impossible of establishing security and control in the graveyard of empires. I'm doubtful that China will take the bait. China already has access to some of the world's biggest deposits of rare earths and minerals and is actively initiating projects around the world to exploit these resources in confirmed and more predictable countries. While China has engaged with the Taliban, diplomatically, it seems unlikely that they're going to rush into much more than that anytime soon.

Their main concern at this stage is that the Taliban will not provide support for the East Turkestan movement and Uyghur separatists, and they've already been given assurances by the Taliban to that effect. So what does the future hold for Afghanistan in the near term? As long as the Taliban stays out of the global jihad business, I wouldn't expect the country to be interfered with very much. I would hope that the country is gonna be left alone and enjoy the more or less isolation of other geopolitically, geo strategically, internationally unimportant, irrelevant countries. And that no one's really gonna care what happens in Afghanistan, they never really did care.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the country's gonna be at peace. The unification of the country under the Taliban has to be understood within the context of the occupation and unite uniting against the common enemy of the occupation. Whether the Taliban is going to be able to hold that unity together in the absence of an occupying army as a mobilizing force and unifying force, that remains to be seen. They were successful in the early nineties, mid nineties in unifying several parts of the country under their rule, but they had opposition throughout their rise to power, their rise to, the moment when they took control in Kabul. There was the Northern Alliance and they had other opposition groups that were against them throughout their history.

That was a different Taliban. You know, if we're being honest, The original Taliban was a completely different Taliban than what we're dealing with today. So it's very likely that there's going to be rivalries in Afghanistan as there have always been, but hopefully there won't be outside external interference and disruption, and those conflicts will be limited and, small by comparison to what they were over the last twenty years. So