Archive: Is the US trying to stoke conflict in Afghanistan as a pretext for continued occupation?

First published at Luikkerland, 13th March, 2012

After the Saturday night/Sunday morning mass murder of innocents in Kandahar by a supposedly lone US assailant, I was looking at the reportage on Sunday morning on the MailOnline website for evidence that could catch their headline, and the drive of their narrative, in a lie. In my view, the Daily Mail is the main propaganda arm of the UK Establishment, and by extension in the especial case of their shared wars, a very useful one for the US Establishment. Therefore, whatever the Mail reports about this case I suspect has ultimately come down from the US military. Less than a day after the event, this official narrative was comprised of a story about a US soldier who acted alone and was suffering from a mental breakdown, as the headline summarises:

American soldier has a “breakdown” and shoots nine children dead in their sleep in house-to-house shooting rampage in Afghanistan that killed 16 civilians

This early condemnation is very significant. When reports of Anders Breivik’s killing spree started rolling off the corporate-media presses, he was immediately linked with so-called far right groups. Stuff started to appear on the internet that appeared to corroborate this, and he was assumed to be a cog in a greater movement. You will notice that in this case, the US staff sergeant was immediately condemned as a psycho-loner – which is a description actually better suited to Anders Breivik – and no time was allowed to elapse when there was a state of no public knowledge about the gunman. The reason why we see an immediate profile – in any case that has political significance, let alone Breivik’s or this unnamed soldier’s – is because the official narrative has to be established from the get-go. The psychological weight allowed by an audience to the first perceptions that have been decisively asserted to them mean that new ideas, when they come, cannot shift the inert collective official narrative. In this case, it had to be established very early that the US staff sergeant acted alone because otherwise, when an alternative account emerges later and if it suggests complicity between the staff sergeant and others – which would be a very damaging revelation – then fending it off, for those who have to do it, is a lot less difficult (as we are about to see).

So, from the beginning, I was looking for the evidence of a lie in the Daily Mail coverage, and I wasn’t disappointed. I noticed the following detail in the body of the article (my emphasis):

One man told the AFP news agency of his great loss. “Eleven members of my family are dead. They are all dead,” Haji Samad said.

“They (Americans) poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them,” a weeping Mr Samad told Reuters at the scene.

Here buried in the propaganda is an indication that the US staff sergeant did not act alone after all. Having seen this, I wasn’t at all surprised when I later saw an RT story that paid more attention and gave more significance to the many apparent witness accounts that told of more than one culprit (I’ll study these in a later article). When I returned to the Daily Mail to see if it had altered its coverage to accommodate what essentially had been a breaking of the official narrative by RT, it was quite evident that an attempt to stitch this alternative account into the fabric of the legend had begun. The eye-witnesses accounts were corralled under a sub-heading that attributed accusations of the involvement of multi US Army personnel to the Taliban. This is a psychological device to make the reader think that the Taliban is inventing stories to further its own agenda. I think that in itself it is quite damning, and points to a cover-up.

In addition, the Mail printed denials by US officials; the first:

A spokesman for U.S.-led forces, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, said that their reports still indicate a single soldier carried out the attacks.

And the second:

A senior U.S. defence official in Washington rejected early witness accounts that several apparently drunk soldiers were involved.

“Based on the preliminary information we have this account is flatly wrong,” the official said.

“We believe one U.S. service member acted alone, not a group of U.S. soldiers.”

Please notice what the accumulative message of these two is supposed to be; Jimmie Cummings, who is presumably a man on the ground, told you that whatever happened in Panjwai district, the US Army’s had its own story. The Washington-based defence official said that whatever was not in the US Army’s story did not happen. What we might miss is the fact that Cummings’ denial acknowledges the possibility of an alternative narrative.

If a group of US soldiers did conspire to go on a killing rampage on Saturday night, then it naturally begs two questions: which soldiers conspired, and why did they do it? Let’s start with the why.

This mass-murder did not happen in isolation. This year there have been the same number of acts of outrage by the US in Afghanistan as there has been months. We’ve had the Koran burning that was followed by a period of death and destruction, and we’ve also had the videos in which US personnel were filmed urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban fighters. Aren’t you curious about this video coming to light at this time? Aren’t you amazed that US armed services personnel would set fire to a load of holy books in the depths of a Muslim country? Why would they “inadvertently” set copies of the Koran ablaze at this time? Isn’t it really almost as if the US wants to provoke the Taliban, and it wants to make Afghanis become ultra-resentful of the occupation? I think this could very well be the case. Remember that the date for full withdrawal is 2014 leaving only a skeletal crew of advisors behind; this might not be enough to guard American interests with regards to the gas pipeline that is due to be constructed from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. We think that the US Government could even currently be in negotiations with the Taliban and the Afghan Government to secure its interests. If the US has no military might to back up its claim, what claim can it have?

I think that with this supposed lone attack, we could be looking at the latest in a programme of efforts by the US to create more conflict by hitting the Taliban beehive with a large stick. The following piece of analysis by the BBC offers further indication of this possible truth:

This killing spree won’t, by itself, lead to a quickening of the pace of a pull-out.

But it may mean less heed will be paid to those like Senator John McCain who think the war is winnable and who think the troops should finish the job before they leave.

This analysis portrays McCain’s voice as being a remote and non-influential one; that is not the case at all. McCain spearheaded the US’s involvement in the invasion of Libya, and he is calling for air strikes in Syria. He is a chief warmonger who apparently doesn’t want the US to pull out of Afghanistan, which means that he wants war there also. People imagine that McCain is some kind of antithesis of Obama – he is not. They both work for the same ends. With that in mind, turning now to an answer for the question, which soldiers could have conspired to commit the latest outrage, we might be able to answer that there was a chain of command all the way to the top. Such an arrangement, I imagine, would mean that any attack would require a patsy to take the blame – someone around whom a narrative could quickly be established regarding mental illness (I will return to this subject in a later article).

If this attack in Kandahar was a dirty tricks operation, it wouldn’t be the first time that such a thing had been staged. In 2005, two SAS men dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police – now supposedly allies – as they were about to blow up a booby trap in Basra at the heart of a religious gathering. The British Army shot up a police station to rescue them, and the MOD demanded corporate-media not to report crucial elements of the incident. The Iraqi authorities had been bemoaning British “provocations against the sons of Basra”, and independent analysts think that the British were trying to stage something that would be blamed on Sunni Muslims, and possibly stoke up warfare between them and the Shia. Suspiciously, the US announced at the same time that it was willing to increase troop numbers if any situation in Iraq required it, and, indeed, we know that the 2007 troop surge was ahead.

I was interested to discover if there had been any previous US military action in Afghanistan which signified a sustained attempt to provoke the continuance of hostilities, and the answer is that there probably has. In 2010 there were acts of outrage against three innocent Afghanis who were murdered by soldiers from the same Joint Base Lewis-McChord from whence the staff sergeant of the latest outrage was deployed. The following detail is from the USA Today:

A dozen soldiers from the base were arrested on a slew of charges that ranged from using drugs, beating up a whistleblower in their unit, and deliberately killing three Afghan civilians during patrols in Kandahar Province. Prosecutors at Lewis-McChord won convictions against four of the five who were charged in the killings.

After the first killing, the father of one of the soldiers called Lewis-McChord to report it – and to say that more killings were planned. The staff sergeant who took the call didn’t report it to anyone else, saying he didn’t have the authority to begin an investigation in a war zone. By the time the suspects were arrested months later, two more civilians were dead.

I for one find it amazing, suspicious in fact, that the staff sergeant didn’t report a gang of outlaws who were planning to do more killing. Would this be because the staff sergeant knew that there was not a lot that could be done to prevent it? Who knows whether these 2010 Lewis-McChord killers should have had a patsy to take the blame for them, but instead had something go wrong – like a whistleblower who told his father so that the operation got out into the public domain?

I think that this story about atrocities committed by an apparent lone gun with his supposed mental illness is worth investigating in the next few days, and as mentioned above, I will be following up with an examination of witness statements, and an investigation into the possibility of the staff sergeant as a patsy.