Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer  

October 7 marked the 16th anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent occupation of this Muslim country which continues, with more bombings and killing of Afghan men, women, and children on the pretext of the so-called campaign against terrorism.
On the allegation that CIA’s own terrorist mastermind, Afghanistan-based Saudi national Osama bin Laden, was involved in the suspicious September 11, 2001 destruction of New York’s 110-storey twin-tower World Trade Center (that was actually brought down through implosion rather than the make-belief crashing of two supposedly hijacked aircraft, which in reality were pilotless), Washington started its state terrorism, which has surged with the coming to power of Donald Trump in the White House.
The quixotic US president, who during the presidential race last year had promised to end the US occupation of Afghanistan, has made a shameless U-turn by increasing the number of American forces in the landlocked country, which has seen no respite from war and devastation since the Soviet Union had sent the Red Army across its southern borders in December 1979.
According to the latest reports, the US military dropped a total of 751 bombs on Afghanistan in September, the highest monthly number in the past seven years.
The figure indicated a 50-percent increase from August (503 bombs), which the US military command attributed to President Donald Trump’s so-called "strategy to more proactively target extremist groups” in the country.
With Trump in office, the US has dropped a total 3,238 bombs in Afghanistan between January and September this year, more than two times the 1,337 dropped the year before.
As observers have been quick to note, the increase in the number of US troops in Afghanistan is not to secure the country or wipe out the US creations, that is, the Taliban, al-Qa’eda, and now the latest entrant Daesh, but to flex American muscles in the face of Russia, China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which do not bow to American pressures and want to peacefully resolve the Afghan crisis.
Over the past 16 years hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been killed by the US troops and their Taliban stooges, while thousands of other innocent Afghans are languishing in the secret CIA prisons, but this has failed to awaken the frozen conscience of the UN and international bodies.
Among the few conscientious persons in the West, Professor Noam Chomsky, the respectable American thinker, has called the US occupation and devastation of Afghanistan as "the most hideous crime in recent years.”
In view of these realities, it is rather unfortunate of the Afghan government to welcome Trump’s announcement of the so-called "new strategy”.
Wonder, why they have become so subservient to Washington and its warmongering policies which will further sink their own country in occupation and the bloodshed.
Trump also attempted to drag Pakistan and India into a war in Afghanistan, but in view of Islamabad’s growing relations with Beijing, he didn’t succeed.
Flaring tribal, linguistic and sectarian conflicts have been pivotal to the US plans in Afghanistan, in order to prevent the unity and mobilization of the Afghan people by sinking them in this quagmire.
It is time the government and people of Afghanistan understand that defeating the Taliban, Daesh and their supporters is possible by cutting off the hands of foreign invaders, since the US military presence has only resulted in terrorism, drug trade, corruption, insecurity, and poverty.
The propaganda machines of the West try to whitewash the painful reality of Afghanistan and the evil policies of the US, but history proves that no nation has attained prosperity and progress under a criminal foreign power.