EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, AUGUST 24 , 2021

Questions on Afghanistan

Aug. 23 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Why did we get into a 20 years’ war in Afghanistan?

The British Prime Minister told us the United States had to. Tony Blair came to Chicago two years before that war started, and said the United States has to “protect” people from undemocratic governments London doesn’t like, by taking those governments out. The term “regime change” was born.

Clinton agreed? Did anybody say no?

Lyndon LaRouche did. He called it restoring the British Empire with U.S. forces. Nine months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. LaRouche warned a major terror attack was coming in the United States to push the country into “emergency government,” and into war. That was Jan. 3, 2001.

But the 9/11 attacks were launched from Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden. Didn’t everybody agree on that?

LaRouche knew better. He said on radio, as those attacks were ongoing, that some other force, not Osama bin Laden, “let down the American security screen” and punctured it to make those attacks possible. Again—to push the country into “emergency government” and set it up for endless war.

Does anybody agree with that?

All the families of the victims of 9/11 gradually got the evidence that a foreign government—the Saudi Kingdom—helped take down that security screen for the hijackers. The 20 years’ commemoration of 9/11 is coming up, and those families wrote to President Biden: “Don’t show up! unless you declassify the FBI report on these Saudi operations first.” He may do it. And LaRouche said the Saudis would not have done that without a wink from the British.

So what did we do in Afghanistan?

Pushed out the Taliban government the U.K. wanted gone. Blair again. He told his Parliament it was “for the protection of our [British] people and our way of life, including confidence in our economy”; and he told “W” Bush it would be just “a short-lived exercise.” The “Blair Doctrine,” the regime-change war policy, is the failure here. And he was found by a Commission of Inquiry to have faked WMD intelligence about Iraq. But the U.K.’s top military institute is still inviting Blair to speak on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

So Biden pulled American forces out.

For doing that, the former British commander in Afghanistan, a Lt. Col. Richard Kemp (ret.), demanded that the American President be, not just impeached—court-martialed as a traitor. You can read what he and Blair and other hysterical British officials said, below.

Biden a traitor to what?

To “Global Britain,” they said. Watch out for Tuesday’s G7 meeting, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is chairing it. The British say: They will push the United States to stay and expand in Afghanistan. And they want Biden out.

What’s wrong with them?

This “Global Britain, and London world financial center, all depends on American muscle being directed by British brains. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche says, without U.S. muscle, “Global Britain” is just a pea-brain.

Then the United States should get out?

More than that. This is the chance to throw the table over and reconstruct instead of bombing, and instead of sending U.S. troops there to confrontations with China and Russia. Let engineers go in and build in that whole region, invest in developing it. Every country in that region agrees that Afghanistan, now, is where the United States and the other great powers could finally start to cooperate in new infrastructure projects and exports of capital goods and machinery.

By flipping the war script that way, maybe the United States could get finally get some justice, for what the British banks did to poor Richard Nixon and the U.S. dollar 50 years ago, on Aug. 15, 1971.