MR Original – Afghanistan: Endless War for Resource Control

MEDIA ROOTS- Last year marked the tenth anniversary of America's invasion of Afghanistan, officially making it the longest war in US history. Now that Osama Bin Laden is finally confirmed dead, the federal government's logic of continuing the occupation remains unclear.

Initially, the Bush administration irrationally insisted that any sovereign nation harboring terrorists was itself complicit in "terror" and therefore open for pre-emptive US military action. This rationale is absurd– just because one criminal might be living inside of a particular country doesn't make that entire country guilty of the criminal's crimes.

In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quick to tell CNN that US forces had successfully pushed the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the region, and reports reveal that Osama Bin Laden hadn't even been in Afghanistan since 2001. Additionally, a White House spokesperson recently admitted that there hasn't been a terrorist threat in the country for the last eight years.

So what has the US been doing in Afghanistan for the last decade?

War has always been about two things: resources and control. Alongside the supposed surprise discovery of Afghanistan's $1 trillion wealth of untapped minerals, it's more than coincidental that before the US invasion, the Taliban along with the UN had successfully eradicated the opium crop in the Golden Crescent. Now 90% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan.

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