Afghanistan: America’s Other Ongoing Proxy War

The development of Afghanistan’s mineral resources has become the center of an information and geopolitical struggle where economic projects intersect with security issues, propaganda, and great-power rivalry.

China is accused of simply digging up and removing raw minerals from Afghanistan for processing elsewhere — a process the article claims amounts to China robbing Afghanistan of its natural resources and deliberately leaving it in a state of perpetual destitution.

What the article deliberately omits is the presence of armed extremists attacking Chinese investments, diplomatic missions, and personnel across the country, making it physically impossible for China to invest in and enable Afghanistan – for the time being — to process this raw mineral wealth domestically and export higher-value industrial inputs for greater profits.

China’s attempts to work with Afghanistan — providing it immediate and desperately needed income to rebuild the nation — come after 20 years of US military occupation and abuses, coupled with the US seizure of over 9.5 billion USD in Afghan assets from 2021 onward and the use of US-backed extremists to sabotage any attempt to stabilize, rebuild, and perhaps even develop the Central Asian country.

The US, having created the death, destruction, and poverty Afghans currently suffer under, through its propaganda organs are attempting to shift the blame onto nations like China attempting to work with Afghanistan despite the challenges deliberately created by the US to do so in the first place.

Washington’s Long History of Using Extremists to Destabilize Others

While the US wages high profile wars and proxy wars around the globe — from attacking Venezuela in Latin America to attacking Russian energy production, storage, and export facilities and attributing it to “Ukraine” in Europe and its ongoing war of aggression against Iran in the Middle East — the US is also waging a number of dirty wars everywhere in between.

This includes across the Central Asian state of Afghanistan — wrecked by decades of US-provoked war — both its proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021.

Despite officially leaving Afghanistan — analysts at the time warned about stay-behind networks of terrorists the US had and would continue to arm and back— preventing Afghanistan from achieving any sort of socio-political or economic stability and spoiling attempts by Afghanistan’s neighbors to work with and help stand up a functioning nation-state and economy capable of providing for its people at home and trading with partners abroad.

This includes especially China.

To achieve this destabilization, the US has utilized its decades-spanning policy of arming and backing extremists through a global network of intermediaries and using them as an expeditionary force where ordinary US forces cannot afford to go politically or are incapable of doing so militarily.

The US famously used such extremists as part of its 1980s proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, specifically.

In 2007, Seymour Hersh, in his article “The Redirection,” would warn:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s........

© New Eastern Outlook