HILLARY CLINTON: “We created terrorists to provoke the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it was a good investment.”
The US created Nazi Ukraine to fight against Russia.
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JOHN PILGER—The truth about the “good war” is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban’s links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America’s proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Known as the Northern Alliance, these mujahedin had been largely a creation of Washington, which believed the “jihadi card” could be used to bring down the Soviet Union.
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PEPE ESCOBAR—ISIS-K, which sports a global jihadi mindset, has typically viewed the Taliban as a group of dirty nationalists. Earlier jihadi members used to be recruited from the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Yet now, apart from former soldiers, they are mostly young, disaffected urban Afghans, westernized by trashy pop culture.
It’s been hard for ISIS-K to establish the narrative that the Taliban are western collaborators – considering that the NATO galaxy continues to antagonize and/or dismiss the new rulers of Kabul.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—There are a lot of warmongers rending their garments over the termination of a decades-long military occupation which accomplished nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Almost as ridiculous are the countless pundits and politicians hailing this as some kind of major accomplishment that Americans should be proud of. Pride, praise and celebration are not the appropriate emotional response to the day. The appropriate response to a decades-overdue withdrawal from a war that should never have happened in the first place is rage.
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WILLIAM HATHAWAY—The USA invaded with a massive land and air assault, conquered Kabul, and installed a figurehead president who had previously worked for the US company that wanted to build the pipeline. He was their guy, and the pipeline was at the top of his agenda.
The Taliban merged back into the rural population, where they have deep roots. To find and kill them, the USA and its NATO partners unleashed a campaign of terror – house raids by death squads (an old CIA card), brutal interrogations, drone strikes, infantry sweeps – that divided the rural population into two groups – the dead and the determined.
