On November 22, 2021, Washington announced the end of the war in Afghanistan. After twenty years of continuous occupation, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and an increase in opium trafficking; eleven years after the official death of one of the CIA’s creatures, Osama bin Laden, Washington withdrew almost all of its operational troops from the country.

The sudden urgency, after a two-decade delay, created chaos: not only was the country left to the supposed enemies, the Taliban (another spin-off of the mujahideen, CIA-developed terrorists) but they were also left as a gift millions of dollars in military equipment, from war tanks to ammunition of all kinds.

The chaos and mysterious urgency were visualized in the despair of the collaborationists and the new refugees, a déjà vu from Vietnam, another historic defeat for the greatest military power in the world. Images of people trying to climb the walls of the Kabul airport, of families handing over their children to the sacrificed marines to be rescued from evil, are a historical genre of media propaganda that nullifies any critical view of reality. To illustrate it, it would suffice to republish the articles of the anti-imperialist Marx Twain, responding to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Heavy Burden”, gone viral in 1899 by an order of Theodore Roosevelt.

On December 31, the Wall Street Journal titled: “Who Won in Afghanistan?” The same article answered: “Private Contractors. The U.S. military spent $14 trillion [more than seven times the economy of Brazil] during two decades of war; those who benefited range from major manufacturers to entrepreneurs.”

After the significant rout in Afghanistan, I published about something that is becoming increasingly clear: the only thing we could expect is another war. What other reason, if not, could be behind a desperate change of strategy and a clear realignment of forces? Wars are big business for private corporations, but governments must provide tsunamis of money, apart from planning a defeat that can be sold as a victory—and apart from geopolitical reasons, of course.

On January 24, 2022, one month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we insisted on another article (“Nuevo enemigo se busca / New Enemy Wanted”): “after the new military fiasco in Afghanistan, and after such a fortune invested by Washington in the private business of war, in the merchants of death, it is urgent to find a new enemy and a new conflict. Before a bigger adventure with China, the choice is clear: continue violating NATO’s promise of no arms expansion to the East, pressure Russia to react by deploying its army on the border with Ukraine, and then, accuse her of trying to invade the neighboring country. Hasn’t this been exactly the history of the treaties signed with the Indians since the eighteenth century? Hasn’t this been exactly the order and method of acting on The Wild Frontier (2021)? Treaties with other peoples have served to buy time, to consolidate a position (forts, bases)”.

A year earlier, in January 2021, the State Department had already threatened European companies with sanctions if their governments continued to build Nord Stream II. “We are informing companies about the risk they are running, and we are inviting them to withdraw from the agreement before it is too late,” according to a government source (Reuters, January 12). This $11 billion project would have meant cheap natural gas for Europe, but it was going to hurt Ukraine by losing fees for older pipelines running through it.

In September of that year, leaks from the Nord Stream II were reported in the Baltic Sea, just after the works were finished. According to Sweden and Denmark, “someone deliberately bombed it”, but the mainstream Western press barely reported it and, when it did, described it as “a mystery” whose main suspect was Russia, the main victim. A classic media war resource, the one that the White House itself supported. In November, the Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist reported the discovery of explosive remains and the Swedish Security Service confirmed that it had been sabotaged.

Shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, media censorship began on both sides and with different techniques. Media such as Le Monde of Paris (“En Amérique latine, les accents pro-Poutine de la gauche”) made Ignacio Paco Taibo and me examples of a Latin American left that blames NATO for the war because, according to this well-known technique of demonization and psychological disqualification, we blame everything that comes from Washington. This is not true, because “left-wing intellectuals” like me support all social plans in the United States and I believe that this country will achieve peace when it wakes up from its war and monetary nightmares. We do not support the business of war and its powerful media arm.

My opinion is irrelevant, but the attacks are significant and symptomatic. I never failed to clarify that I did not support a Moscow invasion of Ukraine, out of mere principle: I cannot support any war, much less a preventive one. Perhaps for this reason, after more than a decade of frequent collaboration with RT TV, we never did any more interviews. On the other hand, warning of the powerful Western war propaganda and the non-existent space given to those who criticize and blame NATO is another form of censorship, a very effective, classic of the so-called “Free World”.

The greatest threat to the American people is the owners of the United States (megacorporations, megalomaniac politicians, kidnapped media, and what President and General Eisenhower called in 1961 “the danger of the Military Industrial Complex”) and their happy slaves (lovers of the weapons and wars, fanatic drug addicts, homeless but evangelized capitalists).

On February 8, 2023, journalist Seymour Hersh published his well-known article stating that the 2022 Nord Stream sabotage was a CIA operation. The White House described it as “pure fiction”, despite the fact that exactly one year earlier President Biden had warned that “if Russia invades… then there will be longer Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it… I promise you we will be able to do it.” Seven months later and five before the war, the pipes on the Nord Stream II blew again.

Was the urgent and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan related to the sabotage against Nord Stream II? I have neither proof nor doubts. In thirty years, the documents will be declassified and prove that Washington and the CIA already had the war in Ukraine in their plans and needed to move the multibillion-dollar resources from the country of opium to a new war that aims to corner China, another enemy invented before that it exists.

As always, in the name of Peace, Freedom, and Democracy.

JM, March 2023