YouSaid · the spoken record

Morgan Edwards

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14

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2022-08-29

most recent

2022-08-29

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1

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un-security-council

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1. “When I published my book in 2011, I naively asked an American former intelligence officer based in Geneva how the United States had managed to fail so miserably in Afghanistan. His response was, “Just follow the money. To some people, the whole project has been a staggering success”. He urged me to look at the writings of Frida Berrigan on the military-industrial complex. Ten years later, with the 20 August 2021 withdrawal and Afghanistan left as a hulking shell of itself in economic collapse, with the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and renewed insecurity, his words ring very true today.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

2. “It was perhaps two people, compared to the hundreds that the WFP was employing at the time. The focus of the WFP on bringing United States wheat into Afghanistan has consequently also enabled farmers to grow more opium, since their markets for wheat have been very distorted. These factors indicate extreme deception about what was really at the heart of the 20-year Western occupation of Afghanistan and what prompted the sudden withdrawal. Far from building a stable State that could never again be host to terrorism, it appears that the entire project was more about recycling United States and NATO countries’ taxpayer money into the coffers of private business interests.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

3. “With land, water, labour and experience, the focus on agriculture would have been the easiest way to develop the economy, enable people to participate and become self-reliant and food-secure. One of my interlocutors says that today Afghanistan is 50 years behind what it used to be in the area of agriculture. It is importing citrus fruit from Pakistan, although citrus had previously been exported from Nangarhar, for example. With more than 90 per cent of Afghans today not having sufficient food, it is obvious that agriculture should have been a major focus. Indeed, when I worked for the World Food Programme (WFP) in the spring of 2002, I was shocked to see that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations had just a handful of international staff on site.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

4. “There was also the failure to involve Afghans in the design and implementation of projects generally, which of course has been disastrous for longer-term viability. Huge amounts were spent on training the Afghan National Army and police force, and a great deal focused on supplying them with United States military equipment, much of which, as we know, was left behind in Afghanistan a year ago. Yet salaries were often embezzled by Government officials, and soldiers were poorly trained and unable to function without United States air power. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has documented the waste and failure of those schemes. Lastly, there was the failure to support Afghan agriculture, which had always been the heart of the economy, with 80 per cent of the population previously involved, directly or indirectly.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

5. “They have also been documented by the Watson Institute, and, of course, the women and children whom we were supposed to be going into Afghanistan to assist have borne the brunt of those illegitimate bombing campaigns. The United States spent approximately $148 billion on supposedly rebuilding Afghanistan. Yet the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has reported many instances in which money was spent on useless white-elephant projects that were simply unable to be used. Such failures lead to the suspicion that the projects were more about recycling United States taxpayer money back to military-supply contractors or arms companies with links to the United States political class, from Unical to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Halliburton and others.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

6. “Fifthly, with regard to corruption, as we were warned by former President Eisenhower, General Smedley Butler and, more recently, Julian Assange, the money-making nexus for the military-industrial complex that extorts the United States and European taxpayer has been catastrophic in Afghanistan. The human and financial costs of the war have been extensively documented by scholars at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. They estimate financial spending of approximately $8 trillion on the post-9/11 wars through fiscal year 2022, or $300 million a day, paid by United States taxpayers to fund the war in Afghanistan. The human costs have included indiscriminate bombings of innocent civilians.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

7. “I would also add that the peace plan, already prepared by Commander Abdul Haq, which had buy-in from all sides by 9/11, was well known in Washington and London before the events of 9/11. Abdul Haq, who was known as a brilliant commander during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union, warned that a bombing campaign by the West after 9/11 would change the political landscape overnight, disrupting the elaborate framework of cells that he had built up within the Taliban to topple the regime internally. I document that extensively in my book. Abdul Haq had also warned of the extremism being fostered in training camps and madrasas in the early 1990s.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

8. “They included, for example, accusations that British special forces had committed extrajudicial killings of detainees in 2011, and that Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO had bombed civilian gatherings, including weddings. The United States’ 22,000-pound mother of all bombs dropped on civilians in the Shinwar region of eastern Afghanistan in 2017 exemplified the inhumanity of the entire operation. Fourthly, there was a failure to understand the legitimate local leadership and to work with the tribal system in rural areas. In that regard, I would add that starting with the Bonn Agreement, many important Pashtun tribal leaders who should have been invited to the state-building project at the very beginning were excluded.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

9. “That climate of impunity further emboldened warlords to return to their fiefdoms to engage in illicit activities such as the expropriation of property and children or drug trafficking, intimidation and murder. By 2005, when I visited NATO countries’ provincial reconstruction teams, I found that NATO commanders thought it appropriate to use local warlords to guard the perimeter fences of their bases. Meanwhile, local Afghans complained to me of the abuses committed by the same NATO allies and felt that their concerns were of no consequence to the West. People therefore turned to the Taliban. Thirdly, there were military operations characterized by the killing of civilians, failed intelligence and war crimes.”

   2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

10. “At a supranational level, the International Criminal Court has also failed to indict any parties for grave human rights abuses in Afghanistan, whether State or non-State actors. The second factor was the failure to support human rights. Despite promises about a new era of human rights and women’s rights, the West failed to adequately fund or support the newly created Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. It also failed to support work on transitional justice or even truth and reconciliation, South African-style. One example was the site of the Dasht-i-Leili killings of members of the Taliban who were captured by Commander Dostum in late 2001. Mass burial sites were left unprotected and the perpetrators unindicted because the crimes had been committed by a Western ally.”

    2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

11. “Behind the scenes, the emergency Loya Jirga was overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, with United States Ambassador Khalilzad publicly humiliating and preventing the participation of the beloved former king and enabling the participation of warlords and the intimidation of democratically elected candidates by armed groups and Northern Alliance internal security. The corrosive issue of impunity and its effect on the rule of law and therefore legitimacy and the ability to build a State is an issue I focused on in my doctoral research. The West failed to engage in such concepts, preferring instead to impose its own version of a so-called liberal democracy on Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the result was a corrupt network State.”

    2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

12. “To know why that catastrophic failure occurred, it is necessary to understand what the main characteristics of the post-2001 Western intervention of Afghanistan encompassed. I list them as follows. The first is impunity. The return and support of unindicted warlords by Western intelligence in October 2001 proved fatal to the State-building project. It led to knock-on effects on security, human rights and the rule of law. I witnessed the political rehabilitation of those allies of the West, newly empowered financially, at the 2002 emergency Loya Jirga, where I was an observer. CNN and the BBC trumpeted the Loya Jirga as a rebirth of Afghan democracy and obsessed over images of Afghan women putting ballots in boxes.”

    2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

13. “Incredibly, the same Western media sirens, led by the BBC, which in September 2001 cheered on the military invasion of Afghanistan — telling a gullible Western public that it would lead to a liberal-style democracy — by August 2021 were feigning surprise that the Taliban had taken Kabul so quickly. But Taliban political influence in rural areas grew exponentially from 2003 in proportion to the broken promises, corruption, brutal militarized response and extrajudicial killing overseen by the West. The fact that the Taliban initially regained influence in rural areas by providing shadow governors to assist with the resolution of disputes and other services is testament to the carelessness of the West in Afghan matters.”

    2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source

14. “Ms. Morgan Edwards: A year after the United States withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan is verging on complete economic collapse, with severe food insecurity, the rise of extremism and fragmentation of the social order evident. An informed insider who recently left Kabul told me last week that the situation was reverting to that of 1992 and 1993, when fighting among factions turned Kabul into a battle zone, with civilians caught in the middle. The rapid disintegration of Afghanistan following the departure of the international community last year is no surprise. To those paying attention, the signs of how it would all end were already visible in 2001.”

    2022-08-29 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.9118 (2022) · source