In the days following the desperate evacuation of US troops from Afghanistan, the corporate press has launched an international propaganda campaign raising concerns for the “human rights” of residents of the Central Asian country.
For the last 20 years, the corporate media and imperialist powers of the world raised no objections as the United States killed over 100,000 people, set up black site torture chambers, carried out drone assassinations and robbed the country of its resources. The major imperialist powers joined the US in the invasion and occupation. The corporate press facilitated the commission of horrific crimes by promoting the war as a “just cause,” a necessary response to September 11, 2001. Those who exposed the real character of the war in Afghanistan—including Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale—were locked up in prison.
But now, all of the tropes employed by the corporate media to “sell” to world public opinion the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, no matter how moth-eaten and worn out, are being revived.
This serves two purposes: to paper over the war crimes carried out by the US in the past and to prepare public opinion for an intensification of imperialist pressure on the war-ravaged population.
Reports of the suppression of a handful of small protests against the new government give few details about the nature of that “opposition,” including whether those engaged in the protests are acting at the instigation of the thousands of CIA agents and “contractors” left behind in Afghanistan by the US government.
The media campaign over repression, however, is entirely cynical and two-faced. Nothing done in Jalalabad or Kabul this week comes close to the mass slaughter carried out by the US on a weekly basis over the course of the last 20 years.
The media is not up in arms over Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whose troops and police killed more than a thousand protesters at a single anti-government demonstration held after his 2013 military coup. El-Sisi, with tens of thousands imprisoned, thousands of them under death sentences, is now one of the pillars of US foreign policy in the Middle East.
The Democratic and Republican parties and the entire corporate media are replete with pious denunciations of the treatment of Afghan women. This same political establishment paid no attention as tens of thousands of Afghan women were killed by American soldiers in US drone strikes or through the devastating social collapse caused by the invasion and occupation.
The New York Times, the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and identity politics, has taken the lead on this issue, publishing an op-ed column by Malala Yousefzai, the one-time teenage advocate of education for girls and survivor of an assassination attempt by the Pakistani Taliban. She urges Americans to “listen to the voices of Afghan women and girls. They are asking for protection, for education, for the freedom and the future they were promised …”
But again, the media double standard is of staggering hypocrisy. In Saudi Arabia, the leading US ally among the Arab nations, women cannot drive, vote or appear in public except under escort of a male relative. Adultery is a crime punishable by death, although Shi’ites engaged in political opposition to the Sunni-based monarchy are the main victims of the mass beheadings that take place on a regular basis.
None of these barbaric practices has threatened the close collaboration of the Pentagon that makes possible the ongoing Saudi war in Yemen, which uses mass starvation as a major weapon, enforced by a naval blockade and air strikes guided by US satellite intelligence.
The media and military-political establishment also repeat concerns that Afghanistan will become a “safe haven” for Al Qaeda. We have heard this one before. This was, after all, the main pretext for the US invasion in October 2001, one month after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
It has long been known that Al Qaeda was first formed under Osama bin Laden’s leadership in the 1980s, as part of the US-backed guerrilla war by Islamic fundamentalists against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan. But after the interval of ferocious hostility that included the 2001 terrorist attacks, Al Qaeda has returned to its roots as an instrument of US imperialism in both Libya and Syria.
In Libya, the commander of the NATO bombing campaign described his role as acting as “Al Qaeda’s air force,” since the Islamists were carrying out the ground war against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. In Syria, both Al Qaeda and its offshoot ISIS received backing from US allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as well as direct support from the CIA.
Meanwhile, ISIS efforts to gain a foothold in Afghanistan have erupted in violent clashes with the Taliban and their allied militia, such as the Haqqani network. Those raising the supposed danger of renewed anti-US terrorism emanating from Afghanistan have not been able to identify any actual terrorists who would be empowered by the new regime in Kabul.
Biden made a significant concession to the pressure to reverse his policy when he declared, in the course of his interview with ABC News broadcast Thursday morning, that the August 31 deadline for the completion of US evacuation operations from the airport was flexible. “If there’s American citizens left, we’re going to stay to get them all out,” he said.
This formulation is so elastic that it could well serve to justify a nearly indefinite extension of the US occupation of the Kabul airport and even renewed American military aggression against the country.
The more fundamental obstacle to a renewal of American aggression against Afghanistan, however, is not in that tortured country. It is the opposition within the United States itself. A poll conducted by the Associated Press during the final week of the collapse of the Afghan puppet regime found that nearly two-thirds of those interviewed thought the Afghanistan war not worth fighting.
The American people are adamantly opposed to further intervention in Afghanistan. That is one reason for the increasingly hysterical character of the media campaign for war. The US ruling elite senses this and through its media outlets expresses a fear that it is losing its political grip on the majority of the US population. The American people, and above all the American working class, are coming to their own conclusions about vital questions of war and peace and calling into question the social, economic and political structures of American capitalism.
Originally published by WSWS.org
As in Iraq, as in Libya, as in Mali. It is time to finally bury the doctrine of the so-called “responsibility to protect”, which was coined at the time of the beginning of the Afghan war, and to brand it as what it was from the beginning: a neocolonial project.
The headless flight of NATO troops from Afghanistan and the havoc they leave behind are only the last chapter in a devastating story that began in October 2001. At that time, the US government, supported by allies including the German administration, announced that the terror attacks of September 11 should be answered by a war in Afghanistan. None of the assassins were Afghan. And the Taliban government at the time even offered the US to extradite Osama bin Laden—an offer the US did not even respond to. Virtually no word was said about the country of origin of 15 of the 19 terrorists—Saudi Arabia. On the contrary: members of the Bin Laden family were flown out of the USA in a night-and-fog operation so that they could not be interrogated. After classified parts of the 9/11 commission report were released in 2016, it emerged that high-ranking members of the Saudi embassy in Washington had been in contact with the terrorists before the attacks. Consequences? None. They are our allies.
So Afghanistan was attacked. Already during the Cold War, the US and Saudi Arabia had supported Islamists there on a large scale against the Soviet Union. Now the Islamist warlords of the “Northern Alliance” were the new allies. The German Armed Forces flanked the US troops. While their deployment was shrouded in the narrative of a “humanitarian intervention”, the Bundeswehr in fact worked hand in hand with the warlords, as investigative journalist Marc Thörner reported. (He was the only German reporter on site who was not embedded in the military.) Thörner predicted that the complicity of the NATO troops in the war crimes and the “counterinsurgency methods from the colonial era” would turn the population more and more against the West and strengthen fundamentalism. We see the result today: the triumph of the Taliban across the country.
The US troops as well as the Bundeswehr and other allies not only supported war criminals on the ground, they also committed serious crimes themselves. None of the perpetrators was ever convicted in court for this. Take Kunduz, for example: in September 2009 the Bundeswehr bombed a mainly civilian trek here, with over one hundred dead or seriously injured, including children. The proceedings against those primarily responsible, Colonel Georg Klein and Defense Minister Jung (CDU), ended with acquittals. In 2010, WikiLeaks published 76,000 previously classified documents about the war, containing references to hundreds of other war crimes. But instead of investigating these cases and bringing the guilty to justice, the messenger, Julian Assange, was pursued. Today he is sitting, critically ill, in a British high-security prison and has to fear being extradited to the USA, where he is threatened with life imprisonment under inhumane conditions. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, came to the conclusion, after an in-depth investigation of the case, that Assange had been and is systematically tortured by Western authorities. Most of the big media, which got a lot of attention and made money with the leaks of their journalist colleague, have now largely dropped him. And with it the defense of the freedom of the press, which is especially crucial when it comes to questions of war and peace. So Assange is on trial—and not the war criminals.
All those who warned against the Afghanistan war were ridiculed from the start as naive pacifists or even accused of evading humanitarian responsibility and thus playing into the hands of the Islamists. But today it is finally clear: the alleged humanitarian operation only plunged the country further into misery and strengthened the Islamists. As in Iraq, as in Libya, as in Mali. It is time to finally bury the doctrine of the so-called “responsibility to protect”, which was coined at the time of the beginning of the Afghan war, and to brand it as what it was from the beginning: a neocolonial project.
Instead of military interventions, one could, for example, begin to drain the terror sponsor Saudi Arabia financially and stop all arms exports there. It would also be worthwhile to advance the project of a Conference for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East, which—based on the model of the détente policy of the OSCE in Cold War Europe—could be working on a new civil security architecture for the region.
The Afghanistan debacle should also be an occasion to question the enormous expansion of Western military budgets in recent years, which was justified not least of all by deployments abroad. German military spending went up from € 40 billion to € 52 billion from 2015 to 2020, an increase of a whopping 30 percent. The US military budget is at $ 778 billion, about twelve times of what Russia spends for its army. This money is urgently needed for tasks that really move the world forward, especially for countering the climate urgency and for a socio-ecological transition. The US military not only has a gloomy balance sheet in terms of peace policy, but is also THE largest greenhouse gas emitter on Earth. It is time for a slimming cure.
It was the spring of 2003 during the American-led invasion of Iraq. I was in second grade, living on a U.S. military base in Germany, attending one of the Pentagon’s many schools for families of servicemen stationed abroad. One Friday morning, my class was on the verge of an uproar. Gathered around our homeroom lunch menu, we were horrified to find that the golden, perfectly crisped French fries we adored had been replaced with something called “freedom fries.”
“What are freedom fries?” we demanded to know.
Our teacher quickly reassured us by saying something like: “Freedom fries are the exact same thing as French fries, just better.” Since France, she explained, was not supporting “our” war in Iraq, “we just changed the name, because who needs France anyway?” Hungry for lunch, we saw little reason to disagree. After all, our most coveted side dish would still be there, even if relabeled.
While 20 years have passed since then, that otherwise obscure childhood memory came back to me last month when, in the midst of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden announced an end to American “combat” operations in Iraq. To many Americans, it may have appeared that he was just keeping his promise to end the two forever wars that came to define the post-9/11 “global war on terror.” However, much as those “freedom fries” didn’t actually become something else, this country’s “forever wars” may not really be coming to an end either. Rather, they are being relabeled and seem to be continuing via other means.
Having closed down hundreds of military bases and combat outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon will now shift to an “advise-and-assist” role in Iraq. Meanwhile, its top leadership is now busy “pivoting” to Asia in pursuit of new geostrategic objectives primarily centered around “containing” China. As a result, in the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa, the U.S. will be trying to keep a far lower profile, while remaining militarily engaged through training programs and private contractors.
As for me, two decades after I finished those freedom fries in Germany, I’ve just finished compiling a list of American military bases around the world, the most comprehensive possible at this moment from publicly available information. It should help make greater sense of what could prove to be a significant period of transition for the U.S. military.
Despite a modest overall decline in such bases, rest assured that the hundreds that remain will play a vital role in the continuation of some version of Washington’s forever wars and could also help facilitate a new Cold War with China. According to my current count, our country still has more than 750 significant military bases implanted around the globe. And here’s the simple reality: unless they are, in the end, dismantled, America’s imperial role on this planet won’t end either, spelling disaster for this country in the years to come.
Tallying Up the “Bases of Empire”
I was tasked with compiling what we’ve (hopefully) called the “2021 U.S. Overseas Base Closure List” after reaching out to Leah Bolger, president of World BEYOND War. As part of a group known as the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition (OBRACC) committed to shutting down such bases, Bolger put me in contact with its co-founder David Vine, the author of the classic book on the subject, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World.
Bolger, Vine, and I then decided to put together just such a new list as a tool for focusing on future U.S. base closures around the world. In addition to providing the most comprehensive accounting of such overseas bases, our research also further confirms that the presence of even one in a country can contribute significantly to anti-American protests, environmental destruction, and ever greater costs for the American taxpayer.
In fact, our new count does show that their total number globally has declined in a modest fashion (and even, in a few cases, fallen dramatically) over the past decade. From 2011 on, nearly a thousand combat outposts and a modest number of major bases have been closed in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in Somalia. Just a little over five years ago, David Vine estimated that there were around 800 major U.S. bases in more than 70 countries, colonies, or territories outside the continental United States. In 2021, our count suggests that the figure has fallen to approximately 750. Yet, lest you think that all is finally heading in the right direction, the number of places with such bases has actually increased in those same years.
Since the Pentagon has generally sought to conceal the presence of at least some of them, putting together such a list can be complicated indeed, starting with how one even defines such a “base.” We decided that the simplest way was to use the Pentagon’s own definition of a “base site,” even if its public counts of them are notoriously inaccurate. (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that its figures are invariably too low, never too high.)
So, our list defined such a major base as any “specific geographic location that has individual land parcels or facilities assigned to it… that is, or was owned by, leased to, or otherwise under the jurisdiction of a Department of Defense Component on behalf of the United States.”
Using this definition helps to simplify what counts and what doesn’t, but it also leaves much out of the picture. Not included are significant numbers of small ports, repair complexes, warehouses, fueling stations, and surveillance facilities controlled by this country, not to speak of the nearly 50 bases the American government directly funds for the militaries of other countries. Most appear to be in Central America (and other parts of Latin America), places familiar indeed with the presence of the U.S. military, which has been involved in 175 years of military interventions in the region.
Still, according to our list, American military bases overseas are now scattered across 81 countries, colonies, or territories on every continent except Antarctica. And while their total numbers may be down, their reach has only continued to expand. Between 1989 and today, in fact, the military has more than doubled the number of places in which it has bases from 40 to 81.
This global presence remains unprecedented. No other imperial power has ever had the equivalent, including the British, French, and Spanish empires. They form what Chalmers Johnson, former CIA consultant turned critic of U.S. militarism, once referred to as an “empire of bases” or a “globe-girdling Base World.”
As long as this count of 750 military bases in 81 places remains a reality, so, too, will U.S. wars. As succinctly put by David Vine in his latest book, The United States of War, “Bases frequently beget wars, which can beget more bases, which can beget more wars, and so on.”
Over the Horizon Wars?
In Afghanistan, where Kabul fell to the Taliban earlier this week, our military had only recently ordered a rushed, late-in-the-night withdrawal from its last major stronghold, Bagram Airfield, and no U.S. bases remain there. The numbers have similarly fallen in Iraq where that military now controls only six bases, while earlier in this century the number would have been closer to 505, ranging from large ones to small military outposts.
Dismantling and shutting down such bases in those lands, in Somalia, and in other countries as well, along with the full-scale departure of American military forces from two of those three countries, were historically significant, no matter how long they took, given the domineering “boots on the ground” approach they once facilitated. And why did such changes occur when they did? The answer has much to do with the staggering human, political, and economic costs of these endless failed wars. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the toll of just those remarkably unsuccessful conflicts in Washington’s war on terror was tremendous: minimally 801,000 deaths (with more on the way) since 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.
The weight of such suffering was, of course, disproportionately carried by the people of the countries who have faced Washington’s invasions, occupations, air strikes, and interference over almost two decades. More than 300,000 civilians across those and other countries have been killed and an estimated nearly 37 million more displaced. Around 15,000 U.S. forces, including soldiers and private contractors, have also died. Untold scores of devastating injuries have occurred as well to millions of civilians, opposition fighters, and American troops. In total, it’s estimated that, by 2020, these post-9/11 wars had cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion.
While the overall number of U.S. military bases abroad may be in decline as the failure of the war on terror sinks in, the forever wars are likely to continue more covertly through Special Operations forces, private military contractors, and ongoing air strikes, whether in Iraq, Somalia, or elsewhere.
In Afghanistan, even when there were only 650 U.S. troops left, guarding the U.S. embassy in Kabul.,the U.S. was still intensifying its airstrikes in the country. It launched a dozen in July alone, recently killing 18 civilians in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. According to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, attacks like these were being carried out from a base or bases in the Middle East equipped with “over the horizon capabilities,” supposedly located in the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, and Qatar. In this period, Washington has also been seeking (as yet without success) to establish new bases in countries that neighbor Afghanistan for continued surveillance, reconnaissance, and potentially air strikes, including possibly leasing Russian military bases in Tajikistan.
And mind you, when it comes to the Middle East, the UAE and Qatar are just the beginning. There are U.S. military bases in every Persian Gulf country except Iran and Yemen: seven in Oman, three in the UAE, 11 in Saudi Arabia, seven in Qatar, 12 in Bahrain, 10 in Kuwait, and those six still in Iraq. Any of these could potentially contribute to the sorts of “over the horizon” wars the U.S. now seems committed to in countries like Iraq, just as its bases in Kenya and Djibouti are enabling it to launch airstrikes in Somalia.
New Bases, New Wars
Meanwhile, halfway around the world, thanks in part to a growing push for a Cold War-style “containment” of China, new bases are being constructed in the Pacific.
There are, at best, minimal barriers in this country to building military bases overseas. If Pentagon officials determine that a new $990 million base is needed in Guam to “enhance warfighting capabilities” in Washington’s pivot to Asia, there are few ways to prevent them from doing so.
Camp Blaz, the first Marine Corps base to be built on the Pacific Island of Guam since 1952, has been under construction since 2020 without the slightest pushback or debate over whether it was needed or not from policymakers and officials in Washington or among the American public. Even more new bases are being proposed for the nearby Pacific Islands of Palau, Tinian, and Yap. On the other hand, a locally much-protested new base in Henoko on the Japanese island of Okinawa, the Futenma Replacement Facility, is “unlikely” ever to be completed.
Little of any of this is even known in this country, which is why a public list of the full extent of such bases, old and new, around the world is of importance, however difficult it may be to produce based on the patchy Pentagon record available. Not only can it show the far-reaching extent and changing nature of this country’s imperial efforts globally, it could also act as a tool for promoting future base closures in places like Guam and Japan, where there at present are 52 and 119 bases respectively — were the American public one day to seriously question where their tax dollars were really going and why.
Just as there’s very little standing in the way of the Pentagon constructing new bases overseas, there is essentially nothing preventing President Biden from closing them. As OBRACC points out, while there is a process involving congressional authorization for closing any domestic U.S. military base, no such authorization is needed abroad. Unfortunately, in this country there is as yet no significant movement for ending that Baseworld of ours. Elsewhere, however, demands and protests aimed at shutting down such bases from Belgium to Guam, Japan to the United Kingdom — in nearly 40 countries all told — have taken place within the past few years.
In December 2020, however, even the highest-ranking U.S. military official, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, asked: “Is every one of those [bases] absolutely positively necessary for the defense of the United States?”
In short, no. Anything but. Still, as of today, despite the modest decline in their numbers, the 750 or so that remain are likely to play a vital role in any continuation of Washington’s “forever wars,” while supporting the expansion of a new Cold War with China. As Chalmers Johnson warned in 2009, “Few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities… If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.”
In the end, new bases only mean new wars and, as the last nearly 20 years have shown, that’s hardly a formula for success for American citizens or others around the world.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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