Bomber Biden Sends B-52s in Tantrum over Taliban Advance

 

BY DAVE LINDORFF

In what can only be called a criminal and murderous tantrum by a loser, the United States, on the order of President Joe Biden, has begun dispatching B-52 Stratofortress bombers and AC-130 fixed-wing gunships equipped with large Gatling machine guns and a cannon to carpet-bomb and perpetrate mass killing on Taliban forces surging to victory across Afghanistan.

The bloody attack by unchallengeable air power in a country that Biden has already withdrawn troops from will not stop the collapse of the US puppet regime in Kabul, and the complete takeover of battered Afghanistan by the Islamic group that the US ousted from power in 2001 and that it has been battling now for two decades. Victory by the tenacious Taliban fighters who have driven the US military out is a foregone conclusion.

All this outrageous and pathetic US tantrum does is slaughter fighters who are struggling to recover their country from a US military that had no business occupying the war-torn country in the first place, while inevitably killing large numbers of innocent civilian men, women and children who are in harm’s way of this broad, untargeted assault.

B-52s, 1950s relics of the Cold War, fly at above 40,000 feet and drop their up to 35-ton payload of bombs and probably fragmentation weapons on broad “target zones” that they cannot possibly see or analyze.

As for the AC-130 Spectre gunships — large four-engine jets equipped with an array of weaponry that allows them to spray a large area with devastating numbers of large-caliber projectiles — these are weaponized platforms of mass murder. It was an AC-130 that destroyed a large and well-marked and identified Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kandahar in 2015 during a time the Taliban had taken over most of that city. That one war crime killed 42 patients and medical workers at the hospital. Under international pressure and facing domestic protests too, the Pentagon eventually “disciplined” 16 military officials, but none were criminally prosecuted in what the US passed off as a series of “mistakes.”

There are sure to be a lot of such “mistakes” being made now in the current futile and petulant US aerial assault on Afghanistan.

Biden, in announcing the pullout of US troops from Afghanistan, pointedly said that the US would continue to use airpower against advancing Taliban forces, even as he said the US was ending the Afghanistan War it began back in October 2001 following the 9-11 attacks. He tried to claim that the US wasn’t losing but was leaving because the “objective” of destroying Al Qaeda, had been “achieved.”

That claim is laughable! Not only did Al Qaeda quickly regroup in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, What perhaps began as an effort to destroy alleged Al Qaeda training camps in that Afghanistan, quickly morphed into an attack not on Al Qaeda, most of which organization’s forces, including founder Osama bin Laden, quickly fled to the safety of neighboring Pakistan, but rather on the Taliban government, which to this day has never attacked the US, but only US forces inside the country. It’s a response which should properly be called “national defense” against an invading power.

Almost from the beginning then, the US war on Afghanistan and the occupation of its main cities by US forces and a puppet Afghan military trained and funded by the US, was a criminal act of imperialist aggression and occupation, aimed at giving the US control of a country strategically located between Iran, China and Pakistan and blessed with vast stores of valuable minerals.

If Biden were correct in saying the US war objective in Afghanistan had been met, there would be no justification (nor is there) for bombing the Taliban as they retake power in the country. It’s their country, they fought to get the US out, and now they’ve won, or will win, bombings or no bombings.

One wonders, as we pass that sad 76th anniversary of another pointless and monstrously deadly bombing — the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of Imperial Japan — whether like that horrific war crime, this criminal bombing of Afghanistan is actually aimed at another country far from Afghanistan.

Could it be that just as President Truman, in vaporising several hundred thousand Japanese civilians, was actually “sending a message” to the Soviet Union that the US had a super weapon and was ready to use it again, this new fit of imperial pique by Commander in Chief Biden was aimed, perhaps, at China — a message that the US was not to be pushed around in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait.

Truman’s message had little impact on Soviet behavior, simply encouraging the USSR to double down on getting its own atom bomb before the US could build enough of its new super weapon to launch a treacherous pre-emptive nuclear blitz on its wartime ally. Biden’s message, if that’s what it was, to China will be similarly ignored, particularly as, unlike the Taliban, China has the defensive weapons to easily take down any B-52 that might dare to venture into Chinese airspace.

The real losers in this display of bombastic bravado by Biden and the US are the Afghani people being killed for nothing and also the people of the US who have to continue spending one-third of the federal discretionary budget annually on arms and war to enable such killing and bravado.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). 

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/13/bomber-biden-sends-b-52s-in-tantrum-over-taliban-advance/