[News] An American Tale as yet untold by the Afghans

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeastmonitor.com
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211224-an-american-tale-as-yet-untold-by-the-afghans/>
An
American Tale as yet untold by the Afghans
Yvonne Ridley - December 24, 2021

According to Christians and the post-Christian world in which many of us
live, this is the season of peace and goodwill to all. However, I derived
little Christmas cheer from an incredible tweet sent by Linda
Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the United Nations this week.

I imagine that the newly-liberated Afghans will be none too impressed by
her response to a UN Security Council resolution to send much-needed
humanitarian aid to war-torn Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation by US
and NATO forces. Basking in what she no doubt viewed as US benevolence,
Thomas-Greenfield tweeted: "I applaud the #UNSC
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/UNSC?src=hashtag_click> for unanimously voting
for this carveout [*sic*], which is desperately needed by the humanitarian
community in Afghanistan."

But what she — and most of the Western media failed to mention — is that
millions of Afghan children are in desperate need and on the brink of
starvation because the US government has frozen Afghanistan's assets worth
more than $9 billion, a move which is wrecking the already fragile economy.
This is America's way of punishing the Afghan people for not rising up
against the Taliban when ordered
<https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210811-biden-says-afghans-must-fight-for-themselves-as-taliban-take-most-of-country>
to do so by US President Joe Biden. It's also payback to the regime for the
humiliating defeat and retreat suffered by US forces at the hands of the
movement.

[image: 18 million Afghans, half the country, need humanitarian assistance
and roughly 3 million are internally displaced - Cartoon
[Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]]

18 million Afghans, half the country, need humanitarian assistance and
roughly 3 million are internally displaced – Cartoon
[Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

There seems to be a conspiracy of silence in the Western media about the
looming crisis, although one British newspaper exclaimed
<https://www.ft.com/content/bdbb57ab-84a8-48b2-ae6f-6177f7830064>:
"Millions face starvation this winter after the withdrawal of foreign aid
after the Islamist group took power." The inference is clear: the Taliban
government in Kabul is to blame. Not the West for occupying Afghanistan for
20 years and failing miserably to do what it expects the Taliban to have
achieved in a matter of months. And not the US Treasury for freezing those
desperately needed assets. It's the Taliban's fault.

However, earlier this week hundreds of angry Afghans poured onto the streets
<https://pic.twitter.com/zVXaBZp2do> of Kabul to protest against the
looming humanitarian crisis, and they knew exactly who to blame. Young men
in the capital's Abdul Haq Square had protested earlier over sanctions, the
frozen assets of the Afghan Central Bank, and the US-engineered crisis.

Sadly, these demonstrations are largely ignored by most journalists who are
clambering over each other to get into children's hospitals to tell the
tale about human misery made in the good ol' US of A without once
mentioning Uncle Sam's role. It's a bit like telling the Nativity Story
without mentioning Herod.

It doesn't matter how much gloss and spin is put on America's involvement
in Afghanistan over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of innocent
civilians have died as a direct result of the US invasion. Now millions
more face an uncertain future involving starvation and worse.

*READ: UNSC adopts resolution to facilitate humanitarian aid in Afghanistan
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211222-unsc-adopts-resolution-to-facilitate-humanitarian-aid-in-afghanistan/>*

Of course, such hypocrisy is nothing new to Afghans who pass their history
down from generation to generation by word of mouth lest they forget. They
know, for example, that it was Afghanistan which apparently triggered Winston
Churchill's thirst for war
<https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-media/churchill-in-the-news/churchill-an-unlikely-adviser-in-the-afghan-conflict/>
in 1897. "All who resist will be killed without quarter," he wrote, because
the Pashtuns need to "recognise the superiority of race." Churchill also
wrote about how "every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once."
Proud of the terror he helped inflict on the people of Afghanistan, one
observer noted
<https://medium.com/@write_12958/the-crimes-of-winston-churchill-c5e3ecb229b3>,
he was well on the road to becoming a genocidal maniac.

Winston Churchill was once credited with saying that history is written by
the victors, but in the case of Afghanistan 2021 it seems that the
Americans are determined to reinvent their disastrous 20-year venture into
the so-called graveyard of empires. The Western media seems to be complicit
in this re-working of recent history.

For the record, it should be acknowledged that the US lost the war in
Afghanistan; beat a hasty retreat; and revived the awful memories
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/16/watch-saigon-kabul-now-afghanistan-airport-evacuation-compared/>
of the Fall of Saigon when American troops fled from Kabul. That should
have been the end of the story, but Washington's meddling in Afghan affairs
is ongoing. It's an American Tale as yet untold by the Afghans, but they
will one day. Rest assured they will.
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