The “Afghanistan Papers”: Deep State narrative management

Kit Knightly

The Big Reveal for the Washington Post this week is the release of the Afghanistan Papers. A series of interviews and documents “compiled in secret” and then the subject of a “legal challenge” from the US government.

The WaPo baldly calls it:

A secret history of the war”

But there’s nothing here that’s really secret, and very little actual history. What do they tell us? Absolutely nothing, except what we’re supposed to believe.

An awful lot of modern “leaks” are no such thing. They are Orwellian exercises in controlling the conversation. And this is no exception, carefully making sure the “establishment” and the “alternative” are joined in the middle, controlled from the same source.

It presents apologism, simplifications and outright fabrication as if they are classified information.

Telling us about “bad intelligence” and a “lack of coherent strategy”, as if THOSE are the biggest crimes of NATO in Afghanistan.

The Guardian articles on the release reinforce the official version of 9/11, The WaPo itself drops nods to the mythologised death of Osama Bin Laden.

It’s all about enforcing the establishment line, disguised as criticism. Real crimes are ignored, whilst smaller, simpler “well-intentioned mistakes” are reluctantly acknowledged.

Nowhere is the illegality of the invasion addressed.

Not once is anyone accused of war crimes.

The Guardian reports don’t mention the word opium, which is bad enough. The Washington Post goes even further – daring to relate the US Army’s struggle to “curb” the spread of the opium trade.

This is an outright lie. Before the 2001 invasion, the opium trade had been all but destroyed by the Taliban.

The Taliban banned the production of heroin in 2001 (just before the invasion). It dropped to almost nothing by the end of the year.

Since the US took control the heroin production of the region has increased almost every year. Today, Afghanistan produces 90% of global heroin.

All this, we are told, while the most powerful military force on the planet desperately tries to stop them. The Taliban did in 6 months what the US army has been unable to do in 18 years.

They say it, and they expect us to believe it. It is nonsense.

It’s all just so pathetic. A weak attempt to clean up a mess twenty-years in the making. Feeble efforts establish a narrative of false “controversy” by presenting us with a fully-formed, ready-meal “alternative opinion”, so all those people who fancy themselves anti-establishment can gorge on outrage, whilst never having to do the difficult job of cancelling their newspaper subscriptions or doing their own research.

Here’s the real “secret history” of the Afganistan war: It wasn’t a failure, it was a success.

In every facet, on every front, Afghanistan is exactly what America needed it to be.

They dripfeed in the blood of young Americans, they destroy 100,000s of Afghan lives, and they reap the rewards they always intended to reap:

1. The permanent slow-simmer conflict gives them an excuse to keep thousands of US military personnel in a country which borders Iran, Pakistan AND China. (Not to mention a host of ex-Soviet states).
2. It keeps military expenditure nice and high, so Congressman, ex-generals and everyone else on the boards of Boeing or Lockheed Martin get great big bonuses every year.
3. They have sole access to the rare-Earth elements and other vital metals in the Afghan mountains. Lithium, most importantly of all.
4. They have control of the world’s opium industry. A vital cog in the relations of the US intelligence agencies, and organised crime. It’s essentially reverse money-laundering – turning tax-payer funds into dark money that can be spent hiring mercenaries, organising assassinations, arranging coups…or simply be stolen.
5. They have access to all the “radicalised” young men they could ever want. A little Jihadi farm, where “terrorists” can be named, trained and sent off to fight proxy wars in Syria, or spread fear and chaos in the West.

Afghanistan is a great asset to the Empire. The US Deep State has spent a fortune making it so. They could at least be honest about it.