THE Afghan puppet president, Karzai, has gone to Washington and been forced, by rising Afghan anger, to publicly complain about the actions of the US government and military.
The revelation that copies of the Koran were flushed down the toilet at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, in occupied Cuba, produced major riots in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These have been given an even sharper edge by the leaking of a 2,000-page US document investigating US army torture and murder at Bagram camp, which shows that two Afghans were beaten to death and many more tortured at the camp at Bagram airport, just outside the Afghan capital, Kabul.
The huge anger that these revelations have caused in Afghanistan has forced Karzai to go to Washington as an angry man, demanding that all Afghan prisoners be placed under his government’s jurisdiction and that his government be allowed to take control of all US operations in Afghanistan.
The UN has supported Karzai’s call. Its spokesman Richard Provencher told journalists that Afghanistan’s independent human rights commission should be allowed access to the Bagram base.
The US has now hit back at its complaining puppet.
One feature of the US-led occupation of Afghanistan has been the resumption of opium production and the heroin trade. These were banned under the Taleban, but have now flourished to record proportions, with Afghanistan producing 80 per cent of the world’s heroin.
The suppliers are the local warlords who were put in place by the US and its allies as the only reliable anti-Taleban leaders.
US officials are now saying Karzai is partly responsible for the failure of ‘poppy eradication efforts’ in Afghanistan, according to a leaked cable sent from the US embassy in Kabul to Secretary of State Rice on May 13.
The statement is true only to the extent that it is recognised that the US has the main responsibility for the flourishing Afghan narcotics trade.
The cable said that Karzai, whose regime could not last 24 hours without the presence of thousands of US troops, ‘has been unwilling to assert strong leadership’ to curtail Afghanistan’s heroin trade.
The US, which supported the recent elevation of the Northern Uzbek warlord General Dostum to the post of commander in chief of the Afghan armed forces, is warning its puppet Karzai that he is, after all, only a puppet, and is both expendable and replaceable.
The rattled US regime has sought to divert the rest of the blame for the Afghan heroin plague onto its ally Britain. The cable stated that Britain was ‘substantially responsible’ for the failure to eradicate more poppy acreage in Afghanistan.
So this is the nature of the alleged Afghan democracy – a paradise for the drug producers and suppliers, guarded and policed by the US, UK and other allies whose role is to prevent the Taleban government from resuming power, whatever the cost to the Afghan people and however much havoc is being caused on the drug-stained streets of the cities of Europe.
Afghanistan is a country ruled by the guns of the US army, enforced by torturers and torture chambers while the supposedly sovereign government has to publicly admit that it has no control over, or access to, arrested Afghan civilians, and no control over US army operations.
Afghanistan has not been liberated. It has been enslaved by the US and the UK for the benefit of warlords, drug barons and oil companies, whose pipelines are scheduled to run through that country.
Afghanistan will not be free until all imperialist forces have been driven out of the country with Karzai and the rest of the puppets in their baggage trains.
