EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR SATURDAY, AUGUST 28 , 2021

‘It Was Time To End a Twenty-Year War’

Aug. 27 , 2021 (EIRNS)—These words—“it was time to end a 20-year war,” were the closing remarks by President Joe Biden at the White House press conference Aug. 26, the day of the deadly terror bombing at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, when Biden announced that the U.S. mission of evacuation from Afghanistan would nonetheless continue. Biden’s words are anathema to the geopolitical networks in London, NATO and their cohorts, who want to perpetuate conflict, fear, and perpetual warfare, under their R2P doctrine, “responsibility to protect,” launched by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

From this perspective, look at the terrorist attack on the Kabul Karzai International Airport. Cui bono? Who benefits from this incident, which killed 170 people and wounded dozens more? Former career CIA analyst Ray McGovern raised this question on his website yesterday, under the headline, “False Flag?” He wrote, “Do today’s bombings at Kabul airport have signs of a false flag attack? If prior intelligence was so accurate, why was the attack not nipped in the bud? Key question, as always: Cui Bono? Who profits from killing Americans at this point? Biden better ask it, before he gets sucked back in.”

The “prior intelligence” McGovern cites, even allowed time for general advance warnings to be issued. Other security experts are asking the same questions. Meantime, there is a new alert today, about the risk of more terrorist acts that may come.

What is indisputable, is that the war factions of the world want to use terrorist attacks as a pretext for re-launching war. There are hysterical calls for the U.S. to send in “awesome” military force, and air strikes to Afghanistan, especially from crazed circles in the U.S. and Britain. In fact, the United States and the Taliban are both targets of these warhawks. The opponents of peace and development are plain freaked out by any collaboration between the U.S. and the Taliban, which is going on at Kabul airport, as well as over the past year. The real enemy is terrorism, and the forces and conditions which foster it. President Vladimir Putin repeatedly has called for major power collaboration on counterterrorism.

There are institutional initiatives at present, which are potential venues for collaboration to root out terrorism, and for support for economic development in Afghanistan and all of Central Asia. This week UN Secretary General Guterres sent invitations for a meeting on Afghanistan for Monday, Aug. 30, to the five permanent members of the Security Council—U.S., China, Russia, France and Britain. Putin has been calling for a summit of these five heads of state and government since January 2020, without a response, to address the multiple global crises now facing the world. Today, the UN Security Council, chaired this month by India, issued a denunciation of the Aug. 26 Kabul Airport bombing.

Meantime, today was the test run for what is to be a UN “humanitarian air bridge” of aid to Afghanistan, through Pakistan, conducted by the UN World Food Program. WFP Executive Director David Beasley, has been in Islamabad this week, meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan. He released a video from Islamabad airport, to underscore that the WFP runs transportation for all UN purposes—personnel travel, medical and food aid, and other functions, and has the assistance of Pakistan.

Yesterday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi came back from a multi-nation tour to the other neighbors of Afghanistan—Iran and the Central Asian neighbors, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—discussing connectivity for mutual economic benefit. Representatives of three of those countries are invited for more discussion to Vienna next week, hosted by the Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg.

What is required in this process of diplomacy for development is both a vision for the region and concrete proposals, which are the hallmarks of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The necessity of supporting economic works in Afghanistan is stressed strongly by Pino Arlacchi, formerly Director of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) from 1997-2001. Both Arlacchi and McGovern have been active in the policy dialogues on Afghanistan with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, held by the Schiller Institute on July 31 and Aug. 21.

Arlacchi said, in an interview with Sputnik Mundo today, that “the only way out now is an ambitious recovery plan based on the development of Afghanistan’s domestic resources.” Arlacchi has done a blitz of international media this week, on the urgency of various actions for Afghanistan, including a drug eradication program, and working with the Taliban for stability. Arlacchi led a program which successfully nearly eliminated opium poppy in Afghanistan during the period he was at the UN, working with the Taliban.

In France, a guest column in Le Figaro today, headlined, “How the West Let Afghanistan Again Become the Land of Drugs,” presents a devastating rundown of how the opium poppy production was drastically reduced in Afghanistan over the years 1999-2001, but then was pumped up again, during the occupation by U.S., British and NATO forces. The author is Bernard Frahi, former Director of the UNODC Regional Office for Afghanistan and Pakistan (1998-2002), during the overall UNODC directorship of Pino Arlacchi. Frahi gives date, time and place of when, after the post-9/11 invasion, the British and U.S. leadership countermanded the actions needed to end opium production.

This takes us right back to the question, cui bono? Who benefits from terrorism, drug-running and war? We can make the “time to end the 20-year war” in Afghanistan, the time to forever end the control by those who promote endless wars.