By Francis A. Boyle
The United States has started the final troops withdrawal from Afghanistan, and has pledged to complete the process by September this year. Be that as it may, the US’ war against Afghanistan cannot be justified on either facts, a paucity of which have been offered, or the law, either domestic or international. Rather, it is an illegal armed aggression that has created a humanitarian catastrophe for the 22 million people of Afghanistan and has been promoting terrible regional instability.
Wrongly defined as an act of war: After the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, it appears that the then George W. Bush administration changed the rhetoric and characterization of these terrible attacks, calling them an act of war though clearly this was not an act of war, which international law and practice define as a military attack by one nation state upon another nation state. There are enormous differences and consequences, however, in how you treat an act of terrorism compared with how you treat an act of war. The US and other countries had dealt with acts of terrorism before. Normally, acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement which is precisely how the 9/11 terrorist attacks should have been dealt with not as an act of war.
But a decision was made remarkably early in the process to ignore and abandon the entire framework of international treaties that had been established under the auspices of the United Nations for the past 25 years in order to deal with acts of international terrorism, and instead go to war against Afghanistan, a UN member state. The Bush administration rejected the multilateral approach and called the 9/11 attacks an act of war. The administration deliberately invoked the rhetoric of Pearl Harbor, which Japan attacked on Dec 7, 1941, during World War II. It was a conscious decision to stoke the emotions of the American people, and thus dramatically escalate the stakes, both internationally and domestically.
UN called 9/11 ‘terrorist attacks’: Immediately after 9/11, the Bush administration went to the UN Security Council in order to get a resolution passed to use military force against Afghanistan and al-Qaida. It failed. Indeed, the UN Security Council resolution that was adopted termed the incident as “terrorist attacks” instead of calling them an “armed attack” by one state against another.
And the US Congress, instead of formally declaring a war, gave Bush a “War Powers Resolution Authorization”. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed against then US president Richard Nixon’s veto by a two-thirds majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and was expressly designed to prevent another Vietnam War.
The WPRA basically gave Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization or state that he alleged by means of his ipse dixit was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks, or else harbored those who were. It was followed by the Congress granting Bush a $20 billion appropriation as a cash down payment on the blank check, for starters, to use military force against Afghanistan.
Clearly, the Bush administration’s war against Afghanistan was not in self-defense. At best, it was an act of vengeance, catharsis or scapegoating. Retaliation and reprisal were not legitimate exercises of the right to self-defense and, therefore, were prohibited by international law.
In order to prevent the momentum toward war from being impeded, Bush issued an impossible ultimatum in his Sept 20, 2001, address to the Congress by ruling out any type of negotiations, refusing all negotiations with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, as well as all the extensive due process protections that are required between sovereign states related to extraditions.
No government would have bowed to US terms: Indeed, no self-respecting government in the world would have complied with the ultimatum Bush publicly gave to the Taliban government. In fact, the Bush ultimatum was drafted in a way that the Taliban government would not be able to comply with it.
The Bush administration’s war against Afghanistan, which violates the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the UN Charter of 1945, constitutes a “Nuremberg Crime Against Peace”. It provides yet another example of why the Pentagon and Bush so vigorously opposed the establishment of an International Criminal Court.
Why did the US launch a war against Afghanistan and deny millions of Afghans access to food, clothing, housing, water and medical care?
The same rationale has been used to maintain the deployment of US troops in the Persian Gulf for more than 11 years. Just as the Iraq War was all about oil and natural gas, the war against Afghanistan was also about oil and natural gas as well as about strategically outflanking Russia, China, Iran and India by establishing US military bases throughout Central Asia. The US is going to be there even if not militarily for quite some time, at least until all that oil and natural gas have been sucked out of Central Asia.
Oil, gas reserves reason for US interest in Central Asia: Why does the US want military bases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan? Very simple: Central Asia is reported to have the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world after the Persian Gulf.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the erstwhile Soviet Republics declaring independence in 1991, US think tanks and their respective “thinkers” carried out all sorts of studies about how US presence in Central Asia had suddenly become a “vital national security interest” for the US because of its vast energy resources yet another “vital national interest” the American public had never heard of or even dreamed about before.
–The Daily Mail-China Daily News Exchange Item
