A war of colonial conquest in Afghanistan

The dropping of the original pretext for the invasion poses the question: with what purported legal justification has the US government and its allies continued and escalated the war? The truth is they have none. Nothing remains but the reality of an imperialist war of plunder and domination.

The US-led occupation of Afghanistan and the terrible violence engulfing Pakistan is the culmination of 30 years of American imperialist intrigue in Central Asia to establish strategic and economic dominance over the resource-rich region.

From 1979, US governments funded and supplied an Islamist insurgency to overthrow an Afghan government backed by the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the Clinton White House encouraged its Pakistani ally to help install the Taliban in Kabul in the belief it would be favourable to the aspirations of US companies to win control of major oil and gas projects in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states, and build pipelines through Afghanistan. When civil war and instability prevented the realisation of those plans, the presence of Al Qaeda was exploited, at least by 2000, to begin preparations for a direct US conquest of the country.

WSWS