Regime Change, Lies and Video Films

By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on August 19, 2021

graphic: Cubadebate

Twenty years of lies from Washington, but only 10 days were enough for the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan. Joe Biden has finished it off by stringing together a pathetic excuse, again a lie: “Our mission in Afghanistan was not to build a nation, not to create a united democracy. Our only national interest in Afghanistan has been and continues to be to prevent a terrorist attack on the United States.”

Who believes him? The Washington Post compiled some 2,000 pages of notes from more than 400 interviews with Afghan military, diplomats, aid workers and officials a year and a half ago. They believed they were testifying on condition of anonymity and talked their heads off about the mistakes of the U.S. military and the deliberate deception of the Afghan population (and the world) to sustain the “regime change” project in Afghanistan at all costs. Lessons learned, they called this an unusual piece of paper.

“Every piece of data was altered to present the best possible picture…. The polls, for example, were totally unreliable, but they reinforced the idea that everything we did was the right thing to do,” said Bob Crowley, the colonel who served as counterinsurgency adviser from 2013 to 2014. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of the U.S. Cyber Army, added: “I don’t have any visibility into who the bad guys are.”

More than 800,000 U.S. troops have been deployed in Afghanistan since 2001. The Department of Defense has recognized 2,443 casualties and some 20,589 wounded. This military institution, together with the State Department and the Agency for International Development (USAID), not including other entities such as the CIA or the Department of Veterans Affairs, have spent 2.26 billion dollars since 2001, according to estimates by the Human and Budgetary Costs of the War on Terrorism project of Brown University, Rhode Island.

The Costs of War project also estimates that 241,000 Afghans have died as a direct result of military intervention. These figures do not include deaths from disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure and other indirect consequences of the war.

It is impossible to ignore the similarities of this data with the regime change plans for Cuba and the continuous threats from Florida politicians. Nearly $250 million in federal funds have been invested in the last two decades by U.S. federal agencies for “regime change” on the island. It should be clarified that these are the public funds documented by the Cuba Money Project, by researcher Tracey Eaton. No one knows how much money has traveled through clandestine and secret channels, while military intervention is always an option on the table for Senators Marco Rubio and Robert Menendez, and Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, to cite those who head the anti-Cuban fundamentalist wing in Washington.

In addition to regime change and money, what links US imperial history with Afghanistan and Cuba are video movies. The ones we have seen these days on the networks resemble the one narrated and lived by writer Eduardo Galeano. The Uruguayan was a member of the international tribunal that judged in Stockholm (1981) the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

According to the official explanation, the invasion was to defend the secular government that was trying to modernize the country. “I will never forget the climax of those sessions,” Galeano wrote. A high-ranking religious leader, representing Islamic fundamentalists, gave a long dissertation full of anti-communist rage. The US government’s freedom fighter – now terrorist – thundered, “The communists have disgraced our daughters! They have taught them to read and write!”

I think Galeano would agree with me that the cry of that gentleman could be exchanged for those emitted, day in and day out, by the legislators of the crusade against Cuba in Washington.

Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English