Why did the US attack Afghanistan?!?

A recent report by the ICOS (International Council on Security and Development) indicated that 92% of the 1,000 Afghan men surveyed in Helmand and Kandahar provinces know nothing about the 9/11 attacks on the US. Click here to read the article.

Many are shocked to hear this finding…interestingly enough, I am shocked to hear that they are shocked!

Why would you expect those people to know anything about it at all?!? How many of the hijackers were Afghans? How many of them were born or raised or even trained in Afghanistan? Did Afghans finance them at least? Do Afghans know them at least? If the answer to these questions point to no such links between Afghans and the hijackers, why did the US attack Afghanistan after the events of 9/11? Here is another shocking piece of information that I can foretell. I bet that not many Americans would be able to answer this question correctly if you were to take a random sample of ordinary Americans off the street.

If you were to conduct such a survey, I am confident that the closest they would probably get to would be something along the lines of “Well, they attacked us first in 2001!” Incorrect! Many around the world do not know that it was not they (the Afghans) who attacked the US in 2001. They were not even friends or relatives of Afghans. Their leader was a Saudi-exile who happened to be sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Or as this Reuters articles correctly states the reason for the attack was the Taliban government’s “sheltering al Qaeda leaders who plotted the 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people.”

What IS really shocking is that even this statement, the most correct response you can ever get, will have a hard time justifying the attack and the common negative perceptions of Afghans around the world.

Firstly, this statement assumes that Al-Qaeda leaders “plotted” this attack, which is being increasingly questioned by many and has not been proven. In fact, the Taliban agreed to handing over Osama Bin Laden if they were provided with a proof and they were willing to having him tried in a third party neutral state (the ICC obviously did not exist then), which was refused by the then US president George W. Bush.

Secondly, even if this link was established more firmly, the attack was not grounded in international norms, but a policy by George W. Bush that he would not distinguish between a terrorist organization and nations harboring them. By the logic of this policy, the US could legitimately attack any country that harbored terrorists. Without mentioning any country names, one can think of multiple cases where the US is and will always be unwilling to act upon such policy.

Lastly (perhaps a lot less controversial to many than my first two points), linking the people of Afghanistan with the policies of the Taliban assumes that the Taliban were democratically elected. What many people forget is that the people of Afghanistan were more the victims in all these years than anyone else. And all they get from every single actor is more victimization, more killing, more mines, more tanks, more 3K pound bombs, and the like. There is obviously some charity too (perhaps a small fraction of the military industrial complex), but even that fails to reach the people it is supposed to.

Now you tell me who is the victim and who is the villain? Are you still shocked by the finding that the big majority of Afghans have never heard of the 9/11 or the twin towers?

Want to change something? Call your local representative to reduce the bombs and increase the food, or even better to increase unskilled jobs (Visit and support www.jobsforafghans.org).