Is China the Real Reason behind the Military Escalation in Afghanistan? Why America's Corporate Elite are Running Scared

We begin with a question. Given the current economic circumstances, what would be the biggest threat facing America’s global dominance and superpower status? More importantly what would the corporate elite controlling Wall Street and our government be most afraid off? A rational analysis would reveal the answer to be not some puny terrorists holed up in impoverished Afghanistan or Pakistan, but rather:

1. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency.
The reserve currency status has been key in allowing America to print/borrow unlimited quantities of money to fund its many wars. As William Buckler points out in his newsletter The Privateer “Central banks and government borrowing were “invented” in the first place so that a government at war could keep its citizens “onside” by NOT taxing them for the full costs of the war. The world’s oldest major central bank, the Bank of England, was chartered in 1694 for the express purpose of bailing out King William III who had been running up huge debts in his wars on the continent of Europe. Every major war since has been fought as much with the printing press as with the bullet. WWI saw US government debt balloon from $US 2 - 28 Billion. WW II saw it surge from $US 40-260 Billion”.

Which begs the next question: why has America fought so many wars? Contrary to the freedom and liberty ideals fed to the general public, many of America’s wars have been fought on behalf of our corporations (think Iraq I & II and Afghanistan as we explain later). For it is precisely this threat/reality of war that has allowed U.S. corporations to wrest control over a country/regions assets (such as oil and gas) and its markets so that U.S. companies can sell their goods.

Note that in the past this was precisely the strategy pursued by European imperialist nations like Britain who plundered their colonies and impoverished the local people. European corporations greatly benefited from having the colonies serve not only as a source of raw materials for their factories, but also as a ready market for their finished goods. Many European nations forced their colonies to buy only expensive European goods by prohibiting them from establishing their own factories to produce goods locally.

This same corporate imperialism is being pursued in present times under the guise of “unfettered globalization”. When emerging economies are forced to open up their markets indiscriminately, their own industrial skills suffer as more well capitalized foreign corporations wipe out domestic producers. Over time their population loses critical industrial skills and becomes beholden to their foreign providers. This is precisely the reason why many emerging markets do not give foreign corporations unfettered access to their local markets. Usually access is given only in those markets where they believe domestic companies can compete effectively with foreign ones.

2. The rise of Communist China in close alliance with Russia is now the single biggest threat to U.S. hegemony.

China currently exercises a massive degree of economic control over the U.S., first as its biggest creditor and second as a manufacturing base for nearly everything Americans consume. In addition, China has been embarking on developing close economic ties with Russia, which not only possesses the world’s largest oil and gas supplies but also has a huge nuclear and military arsenal. To elaborate on this point further we quote extensively from an article by F.W. Engdahl, who is one of the foremost geopolitical analysts. In his article “The Geopolitics behind the phony US war in Afghanistan”, he writes:

The purpose of the alleged US war against both Taliban and Al Qaeda is in reality to place its military strike force directly in the middle of Central Asia. It is a platform from which US military power could directly threaten Russia and China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little has changed geopolitically over more than a century of wars.

Afghanistan is regarded by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, had been in negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai [India]. Karzai, before becoming puppet US president, had been a Unocal lobbyist”.

Officially, of course, Washington claims it has built its military presence inside Afghanistan since 2002 in order to protect a “fragile” Afghan democracy. It’s a curious argument given the reality of US military presence there.

In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The nine are in addition to the three major US military bases already installed in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, ostensibly to isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin Laden.

The Pentagon built its first three bases at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan; and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was constructed a mere 100 kilometers from the border of Iran, and within striking distance of Russia as well as China.

Mr. Engdhal goes on to write that the purported Al Qaeda threat simply does not exist.

The truth of all this deception around the real purpose in Afghanistan becomes clear on a closer look at the alleged “Al Qaeda” threat in Afghanistan. National Security Adviser to President Obama, former Marine Gen. James Jones has made a statement, conveniently buried by the friendly US media, about the estimated size of the present Al Qaeda danger in Afghanistan. Jones told Congress, “The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” That means that Al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan. Even in neighboring Pakistan, the remnants of Al-Qaeda are scarcely to be found.

Thus in reality America's corporate elite are running scared. The reckless policies pursued by Wall Street and their appointed puppets in the U.S. Government have resulted in a deep financial crisis that is causing the dollar to lose its reserve status, thus threatening the elite's unlimited source of cheap funding. On top of this, the rise of China has thrown a wrench in their global asset acquisition plan. And lastly the corporate elite on Wall Street and in Washington are facing a powerful domestic backlash from an angry American population, that is just realizing the true extent to which they have been robbed. At this point the elite are getting more and more desperate. As Mr. Engdahl points out:

The US elites have lost what in Chinese imperial history is known as the Mandate of Heaven. That mandate is given a ruler or ruling elite provided they rule their people justly and fairly. When they rule tyrannically and as despots, oppressing and abusing their people, they lose that Mandate of Heaven.

If the powerful private wealthy elites that have controlled essential US financial and foreign policy for most of the past century or more ever had a “Mandate of Heaven” they clearly have lost it. The domestic developments towards creation of an abusive police state with deprivation of Constitutional rights to its citizens, the arbitrary exercise of power by non elected officials such as Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and now Tim Geithner, stealing trillion dollar sums from taxpayers without their consent in order to bailout the bankrupt biggest Wall Street banks, banks deemed “Too Big To Fail,” this all demonstrates to the world they have lost the mandate.

In their desperation to maintain their global empire, America's corporate elite may very well have put the country and the world on a path of terrible confrontation. It is time for the world to stop them from achieving their hedonistic goals.