Dennis: Yes, indeed. Well can we start in Afghanistan? Can I get you to respond to the bloody and disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20-years of a bloody, senseless and illegal occupation?
John: Well it was coming, wasn’t it, and here it is finally. And it’s a repetition of something we’ve seen in the past and which I’ve witnessed in Vietnam and Indochina. But do we have to go through this again? That’s what surely people now have to ask themselves, 20 years of suffering and disaster, and Afghanistan had led – compounded the suffering for many people, of course, and has given us almost a front seat of Imperialism’s ruthlessness and inhumanity and failure. I find it very difficult to say more than that.
I was in Saigon on the last day there. I was in many other places, and I reported from and filmed in Afghanistan two years after the U.S. coalition invasion in October 2001. And then it was evident. I think – the headline over my first published dispatch in the London Mirror was This War is a Fraud. And that was late in 2001. It was clear then that it was a fraud. Osama Bin Laden had almost certainly left Afghanistan. The Taliban were – had been a client of the Bill Clinton Administration.
The Clinton Administration wanted to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan, and were offering – I remembered the figure actually. They were offering something like – they were offering the Taliban 58 cents per cubic feet of natural gas. That was the deal. But I’m mentioning this because the U.S.
— source counterpunch.org | Dennis Bernstein | Sep 10, 2021