Anand Gopal talking:
this is probably the third or fourth major escalation of the United States in the last 15 or 16 years. And the previous three escalations have ended up in the exact same way, which is that there has been more troops and more airstrikes, more death and devastation, and yet the same result at the end, which is the Taliban continues to hold large parts of rural areas in Afghanistan while the Afghan government, which the U.S. is backing, is clinging to the cities and certain areas in the north.
the Afghan forces have an extraordinarily high attrition rate. There’s a high desertion rate. And by the way, this is the best functioning institution in Afghanistan, and they have been unable to dislodge the Taliban from their strongholds. Conversely, the Taliban have been unable to dislodge the Afghan government from the major cities. And so you really have essentially a war of attrition. Neither side is able to defeat the other side, and the U.S. is continuing to prop up one side. So my fear is you will essentially see a war in perpetuity.
– residents of the Northern Kunduz province—this was what, in early November—saying U.S. airstrikes killed scores of civilians Friday after bombs fell on three villages west of the district capital. Residents say Afghan security forces wouldn’t allow them to access the attack sites to pick up the bodies of their relatives, making an accurate account of the death toll impossible. One provincial council member said about 55 civilians were killed while an Afghan aid worker put the total at at least 40. The attack came two days after 15 people were killed and dozens wounded when an attack on a fuel tanker northwest of Kabul set a passenger bus on fire. No claim of responsibility in that attack. Elsewhere the U.S. military said one soldier was killed after a battle in the eastern Logar province. The increased violence coming as the Trump administration ramps up the War in Afghanistan, again already the longest in U.S. history.
It’s just an unending tragedy, and we don’t even know how many civilians are being killed. We don’t even—there’s many attacks that actually don’t even get reported. Right now, the media presence in Afghanistan is probably the lowest point it’s been in the last 10 or 15 years. There’s just no reporting on the ground. When the previous administration, the Obama administration, was doing essentially the same thing, at least there were some reporters on the ground who could find major incidents. Right now, we don’t even have that.
And what we have right now in Afghanistan is essentially two sides that are more or less equally matched, and it’s going to continue that way for as long as we can foresee, which means civilians are going to continue to be caught in the middle.
The only way that can change is if here in the United States, people realize what is being done over there in our names. That civilians are being killed. And that’s why the act of counting civilian casualties and actually being on the ground is so vitally important, and unfortunately we don’t have that right now in Afghanistan.
There have been off-and-on contacts, but the problem has been that the United States, either the Barack Obama Administration or the Trump administration, has not been serious about a negotiated solution. They have not been serious about peace. And the reason for that is because they can continue this war basically in perpetuity.
The political cost for the United States is very low. There’s no anti-war movement in this country. There’s no sentiment that the U.S. is there for a long time and it’s costing a massive amount of money or blood. And so I think the calculus for the politicians has been, “We’ll just continue this basically forever, and it’s not going to be a problem.” That’s easier and safer to do than try to pursue a negotiated settlement.
That was the site of the Doctors Without Borders hospital that was attacked by the U.S. military in 2015. And now this latest bombing in 2017.
And another bombing a few years earlier where they also—NATO also bombed a fuel tanker and killed about 100, 150 civilians. So one of the tragedies is people know the names of provinces in Afghanistan by the number of civilians that have been killed in these major massacres.
It’s the world’s leading producer of opium. But it’s important to realize that the people who produce and sell these things are equally on the Afghan government side that’s backed by the United States, and on the Taliban side. That what the U.S. is doing is attacking one set of drug traffickers while effectively protecting another set of drug traffickers.
And by the way, on this strike, they actually uploaded a video of this strike, similar to the strike that we described on Basim Razzo’s house. And what that should tell us is we should have a lot of skepticism with these sorts of videos. We can’t just accept that this is actually a drug production facility because the video says so.
they’re using all sorts of things now. It’s not just a drone war. It’s all sorts of conventional aircraft. Now there’s talk about rolling out the F-35, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars. And there’s all sorts of money to build new sorts of aircraft to bomb people, but not money for other basic human things.
this is a bonanza for the U.S. military contractors. I think that the continuation of the Afghan war is great for the beltway bandits. It’s great for military contractors. And it’s the same in Iraq and Syria as well.
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Anand Gopal
reporter and assistant research professor at Arizona State University and the author of No Good Men Among the Living. He is the co-author of The New York Times investigation into the civilian death toll of the U.S.-led war against ISIS, called “The Uncounted.”
— source democracynow.org 2017-11-22