Afghans’ 40-year torment will not end anytime soon!

Afghanistan has become the latest example of how even though the U.S. is militarily capable of destroying an established order, it is utterly unable to build a new one in its place. Following a two-decade occupation, America is withdrawing from Afghanistan. It had invaded the country under the guise of destroying the Taliban regime and allegedly building a new state order. As is seen in the example of Iraq, the only thing the U.S. is capable of building is “chaos.” Those who profit from chaos funded by taxpayer dollars of the average American citizen are the “Military Industrial-Congress-Academia-Media Complex.”

As the U.S. prepares to complete the pullout of troops by September 11, it leaves behind the Taliban, which is preparing to seize control over Kabul. In my previous article I had mentioned how Afghanistan had turned into the U.S.’s “second Vietnam.” 

The U.S. had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, and the Northern forces who were advancing in the South captured the capital of Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh, thus uniting the country.

Now, the Taliban, which largely controls rural Afghanistan, is now preparing to take the war to urban centers. During recent days, the Taliban captured dozens of districts in the northern part of Afghanistan’s countryside. Hundreds of regime soldiers laid down their arms and took refuge in Tajikistan after the Taliban guaranteed them safe passage. According to assessments by American intelligence sources, it is very likely that the Kabul administration will collapse six months after the U.S. military has withdrawn. These assessments claim that the U.S.-backed Kabul administration is set to unravel even more rapidly than the U.S.-backed Saigon administration.

Afghanistan occupies an important geopolitical position in Eurasia. It also attracts the attention of great powers in terms of its geo-economic potential. 

Furthermore, Afghanistan is a mineral-rich country. Natural gas deposits in the north are in Russia's area of interest. China, on the other hand, has its eye on uranium, gold and iron resources, as well as lithium, which is used in new generation technologies and the automotive industry. While European countries, primarily Germany, are eyeing lithium resources like a hawk. Beijing also has its sights set on copper mines resting under an ancient city layer that are worth about $100 billion.  

Despite signing a 30-year agreement with the Afghan administration, China has not yet been able to extract copper due to the raging conflict and archaeological reasons.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump frequently complained about China processing the country’s copper minerals despite his own country having spent trillions of dollars in Afghanistan. These untapped Afghan mines carry grave significance in terms of the geo-economic rivalry between the U.S. and China. 

Eric Prince,  the former founder of the dubious private security firm Blackwater and the brother of Trump's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, presented an ambitious plan to the White House claiming that if the Afghan war had been "privatized," the country's mineral resources would have also come under their control. However, the Pentagon nipped that plan in the bud. Prince’s “Afghanistan plan” was branded in the media as the American version of the “British East India Company.” Who’s in whose pocket? Let me remind you that Prince is doing business with China, as well as with General Khalifa Haftar, who, with the UAE’s backing, wants to overthrow the legitimate government in Libya.

The Beijing government wants to expand its “China-Pakistan Economic Corridor,” which is one of the important legs of the “One Belt-One Road” initiative that sent shockwaves across the U.S. in terms of the geo-strategic, geo-politic and geo-economic rivalry, spreading all the way to Afghanistan. The first leg of the Afghanistan line in this 62-billion-dollar corridor is the construction of a highway connecting Kabul to Peshawar. If realized, this highway will become an important component in the "China-Pakistan Corridor."

It is no secret that the U.S. will try and prevent China’s strategic expansion, and that it will find ways to attempt to sabotage its One Belt-One Road initiative. Proxy wars, which are expected to be waged at the geographical choke points of the One Belt-One Road initiative, will be used as one of these means. It seems that the torment of the Afghans, who have been at war for 40 years, starting with the Soviet occupation in 1979, will not end anytime soon. In whatever capacity it is defined, capitalism is always waiting to pounce on the virgin lands of the world.