War Has Made Afghanistan's $1 Trillion in Minerals Worthless

Nov 27, 2017 | Eric Schewe
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Middle East observers surfaced last month to remind the American public that the United States’ war in Afghanistan had entered its seventeenth year. This makes it by far the longest military conflict in American history. Although Trump ran on a platform of military disengagement around the world, he has appointed retired generals James Mattis as his Secretary of Defense and John Kelly as his chief of staff and adopted their imperial outlook on U.S. national security. The U.S. military is once again expanding its troop presence in Afghanistan with a vague mandate to fight terrorism, a battle with no end in sight. Although Trump has embraced this globalist “forever war,” he has not exclusively embraced the liberal language that has long justified it, such as advocating the protection of civil rights. Rather, he continues to claim that the United States should have “taken Iraq’s oil.” This has had the odd effect, however, of pulling back the curtain on the economic imperatives for U.S. war and empire that have always existed.