Is Afghanistan just another kind of Vietnam?

John Maresca, Union Oil of California's (UNOCAL) vice president for international relations, testified before the House Committee on International Relations on Feb. 12, 1998, that Afghanistan and the Central Asian region, historically a rich mineral resource region since the days of Marco Polo and the great Silk Road, contains significant oil and gas and other mineral reserves and that the most efficient way of meeting the expanding petroleum needs of Asia and Western Europe is the construction of a pipeline across Afghanistan.

Norman Bernstein

He urged a change in U.S. foreign policy that would enable UNOCAL and its partners to again make Afghanistan the crossroads between Europe and Asia; a new Silk Road. UNOCAL had agreements to buy gas from Turkmenistan and to sell it to Pakistan.

All they needed was a pipeline across Afghanistan to deliver it. A necessary precondition for this to occur was a U.S. military presence sufficient to ensure the stability of the region. We invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

On Dec. 31, 2001, the second President Bush appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, an American citizen who was born in Afghanistan, and who had served on the National Security Council, to be special envoy to Afghanistan. He was later made U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, from 2003-2005. Mr. Khalilzad, during his time as a paid lobbyist for UNOCAL, which was acquired by Chevron in 2005, had urged the U.S. government to establish more of a presence in Afghanistan and to be more supportive of the Taliban.

He helped direct the U.S. effort to arm the Muslim fundamentalist mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union. In 1992, under Paul Wolfowitz in the Department of Defense, he was the primary author of the Defense Planning Guidance, which was the neocon's first statement advocating U.S. global supremacy based on overwhelming U.S. military power. He has been criticized for his close connection with Islamic extremists, his financial ties with UNOCAL, and for his role in bringing a Taliban delegation to Texas for a meeting with UNOCAL. Khalilzad, who is currently a lobbyist for companies seeking government contracts in Afghanistan, was one of the prime architects, along with Wolfowitz, Perle and Rumsfeld, in creating the Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" scenario.

Richard Butler, of the Council of Foreign Relations, wrote in the New York Times of Jan. 18, 2002, that "the war in Afghanistan has made the construction of a pipeline across Afghanistan politically possible for the first time since UNOCAL ... competed for Afghan rights in the mid-1990s."

Geological surveys conducted by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s confirmed the existence of vast mineral reserves in Afghanistan, as quoted in The Mining Journal of June 1984. Their geological maps listed more than 1,400 mineral outcroppings and commercially viable mineral deposits.

Afghanistan is one of the world's richest mining regions, containing significant reserves of natural gas, oil, gold, copper, lithium, uranium, iron ore, coal, cobalt, chromium, lead, zinc and precious stones, especially emeralds and rubies.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which began in 2001, and was called Operation Enduring Freedom, is a war for these natural resources. I wonder which Madison Avenue public relations firm the Pentagon uses to come up with these names.

These resources, that used to belong to the Afghanistan government, have been privatized by the government of Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan since 2001, under the New Mining Law of 2006. Exploration and development contracts have already been given to newly organized private

companies, in partnership with the Karzai family holdings. The Karzai government has also passed a very low 20 percent corporate tax rate and passed a new law that makes re-nationalization of these resources unconstitutional. Among the new partners is a consortium put together by one of the "too big to fail" U.S. banks, J. P. Morgan Chase.

Afghanistan's first railway was completed in 2010, from Mazar-i-Sharif to Uzbekistan, opening a gateway for mineral export into Europe. Of course, its operation, and that of the various mining and petroleum interests in the region, is dependent on a significant and permanent U.S. military presence.

Until now, the domestic economy of Afghanistan has been based primarily on heroin dollars, which generate cash earnings of $200 billion a year in the world market. Since the U.S. invasion in 2001, heroin production in Afghanistan increased more than 35 times, from 200 tons in 2001, to the current rate of more than 7,000 tons a year. Of that $200 billion, it is estimated that $2-3 billion goes directly to the local government of Hamid Karzai. President Karzai has refused to allow his government to participate in an international proposal to end poppy production in Afghanistan, and his late brother,

Ahmed Wali Karzai, is widely believed to have been a major player in the heroin trade. It would appear that the U.S. government is making the same policy decisions regarding the natural resources in Central Asia in the years following 2001 as did the U.S. government in the 1960s and 1970s regarding the natural resources of Southeast Asia.

Are we looking at Vietnam all over again, as the flag of the United States government continues to follow the perceived profit needs of United States business interests, with the same loss of life and national treasure?

Who benefits? We know of too many young men and women, just from Havre, Mont., alone, who are now in Afghanistan — doing what? Making the world safe for the so-called democracy of Hamid Karzai and the profits of UNOCAL and J.P. Morgan Chase?

The U.S. currently has 66,000 troops in Afghanistan. Since 2001, more than 2,000 U.S. troops have

been killed and more than 20,000 wounded.