Is this a foreign policy of liberation, or just a perpetual motion machine designed to feed the war economy?
Grinning Demons
The most chilling confession in modern U.S. foreign policy wasn’t made in a courtroom. It was made in a magazine interview.
It were generally accepted that the Soviet Union was the unprovoked aggressor in Afghanistan, and the U.S. stepped in to defend a sovereign nation.
But the architects of the empire have already admitted the truth: The invasion was deliberately provoked.
Former CIA Director Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski confirmed what history books hide: The U.S. didn’t arm the Mujahideen after the Soviets invaded in December 1979. They armed them six months before.
Why? Brzezinski wrote to President Carter on the very day the aid began: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”
It was a calculated trap. And the Afghan people were the bait.
Years later, when asked if he regretted arming the extremists who would eventually become the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, Brzezinski’s answer exposed the pure, sociopathic calculus of hegemony:
“What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?”
To the imperial mind, 1.8 million dead Afghans, 2.6 million refugees, and a country littered with 10 million landmines were not tragedies. They were acceptable line-item expenses.
But the lie didn’t end in the 1980s. The U.S. didn’t “liberate” Afghanistan by funding the Mujahideen, and it certainly didn’t “liberate” it during the 20-year occupation after 9/11.
Remember Barack Obama’s famously eloquent promise to “destroy, dismantle, and eliminate” the Taliban and Al Qaeda? It was a masterclass in using beautiful, wise-sounding words to mask a catastrophic reality.
When the U.S. finally “withdrew” in 2021, it didn’t leave behind a liberated democracy. It handed the keys of the country right back to the exact same Taliban it swore to eradicate.
The Afghan people were never allies; they were cannon fodder. First for the Cold War, and then for two decades of military-industrial profit.
When a US empire spends 40 years and trillions of dollars, sacrifices millions of lives, only to return a country to the exact same rulers it went to war to overthrow, we must ask:
Is this a foreign policy of liberation, or just a perpetual motion machine designed to feed the war economy?
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