So Please Tell Me Again:

What's the Afghanistan War About?

August 8, 2010 When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can't easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn't help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11.

We have to fight in Afghanistan because ... somehow ... it's tied into what happened on September 11, 2001. Here's Vice-President Joe Biden: "We know that it was from the space that joins Afghanistan and Pakistan that the attacks of 9/11 occurred." 1

Here's Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): "This is the place [Afghanistan] we were attacked from 9/11." 2

Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking House Republican, asserted that the revelations in the Wikileaks documents do not change his view of the Afghan conflict, nor does he expect a shift in public opinion. "Back home in Indiana, people still remember where the attacks on 9/11 came from." 3

Here's President Obama a year ago: "But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans." 4

And here is the president, two days after the release of the Wikileaks documents, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned". 5

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Continued

The Afghan Occupation Stopped being Anything about 9/11 as soon as the drums beat towards Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 nor anything else as to reasons for! Now it's just another Quagmire of once again lost promises made at the beginning and throughout, extremely failed policies of the previous recent years and no direction in helping the Afghan People! All it and Iraq have done is greatly damaged National Security, as to criminal terror acts, for many involved! It has enhanced the hatreds that were already growing and shown exactly, what the once propaganda used to describe western countries, that many are not how they describe themselves to be while condemning others for they do exactly what they condemn! And now left to the next generations to deal with the blowback, on many fronts!