Afghanistan now called forgotten war

AFGHAN woman (Paula Bronstein) Feb 19 2018

The US-NATO war in Afghanistan has gone on for over 16 years & is now being called “the forgotten war” despite the US dropping the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal, last April & despite US deployment of 5,000 more troops just in the past few months. Last year, the US admitted to 11,000 troops in Afghanistan but even the NY Times called the Pentagon out for lying. They don’t include all of the troops nor the CIA operatives & the thousands of mercenaries they deploy.

The war which was launched after 9/11/2001 was originally justified by the hunt for Osama bin Laden who they claimed was holed up in a cave with his dialysis machine. Then they claimed it was to liberate women from Islamic fundamentalism by bombing the hell out of schools, fields, mosques, hospitals, villages, & dropping land mines by the hundreds of thousands. For evidence of that obscenity they pointed to a beauty parlor in Kabul where women could get their nails done for the funerals of their loved ones who were bombed to death or killed by a land mine. The Pentagon won’t deal with the issue of sexual assault within the US military but had the temerity to claim it gave a damn about Afghan women. It was the first major use of Islamophobia combined with misogyny as a propaganda tool to justify war, occupation, persecution, genocide.

The war has created millions of refugees & massive homelessness; child labor is rampant because their labor is needed for survival when adults have been killed; Afghan children suffer one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world; thousands have had limbs blown off by land mines; thousands are subjected to drone aerial bombings; war crimes are routine.

This is an Afghan woman with injuries sustained from war. This is what the US Pentagon dares call emancipation. We cannot let the war in Afghanistan be forgotten. It is a political imperative to rebuild the international antiwar movement on a principled basis that opposes occupation & the bombing of civilians & demands the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign armies, undercover operatives, & mercenaries.

We stand in full solidarity with the people of Afghanistan in their fight against US-NATO aggression.

(Photo by Paula Bronstein)