20 years later: the resounding beginning and shameful end of the US’ Afghan war

The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 in New York, when two civilian planes filled with passengers and, according to the official version of the US authorities, hijacked by a group of suicide bombers from the Islamist radical group Al-Qaeda, crashed into the Twin Towers of the American Trade Center, became the starting point of a turn to a new world order.

Since then, a global turn initiated by the United States has begun from the previous methods of politics and diplomacy to a new one, corresponding to the needs and capabilities of the United States, with the taking into account of their victory over the USSR in the Cold War.

The reason why the United States decided to send its troops to Afghanistan remains a subject of debate among historians and political scientists. There are many versions here, but we should be more interested not in who was the orderer and the perpetrator of the terrorist attack, but what global significance this event had in the world, what consequences it led to and how it affected world history over the past 20 years.

The interpretation of the terrorist attack’s background is closely tied to the political order in the course of the ideological war between competing geopolitical centres and is considered in the general context of the global confrontation. What assessments are given and what conclusions are drawn is a reflection of the acute struggle for the creation of a new world order, which was understood in 2001 as the legitimisation of new US approaches in managing of the unipolar world.

The mechanism that developed in the era of bipolarity was based on a whole set of coordination procedures called "international law". The deep state of the United States was forced to experience certain restrictions in its foreign and domestic policy, although it always had the opportunity to neglect them.

The planned qualitative change in global finance and technology, combined with the disappearance of the main enemy in the face of the USSR and the absence at that time of a real threat to American interests from China, created the possibility of direct control of world processes from Washington, excluding any deterrent mechanisms. By the beginning of the 21st century, they began to prevent the United States from playing the role of the world gendarme, and justifications were needed for "optimising the system".

Thus, it is important to state: in 2000, the ruling elite of the United States faced the need to look for a reason to get out of the system of restrictions that developed after the Yalta Conference post-World War II and strengthened by the decisions of the Final Agreement on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as the "Helsinki Act".

It's the terrorist attack in New York on September 11, 2001, carried out under the banner of radical Islamism, which became this reason. There is an answer to the question "why Afghanistan": it was a classic "grey zone", in which the image of the enemy was easily created and which allowed justifying any strengthening of the dictatorship.  Afghanistan is a place where the Taliban, raised by the intelligence agencies of the United States and Britain, have ruled since 1996.

There were also other radical Islamist movements and groups, which created a competitive relationship between them (the deliberate policy of their Anglo-Saxon creators). But in the face of the "infidels" they observed unity. It is precisely for this reason that the Taliban refused to extradite to the United States the head of Al-Qaeda accused of the 11.09.01 terrorist attacks Osama Bin Laden.

The NATO invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999 was the forerunner of the US’ invasion of Afghanistan. New management mechanisms were tested, providing for the ability of the United States to subordinate the UN, NATO and the world community to its political goals, explaining this by an emergency situation. It's already back then that it became clear how to use the new bogeyman in the face of Islamism to achieve the goals of the globalists. There is a very direct connection between the war in the Balkans in 1999 and the events of 2001.

Yugoslavia is a scenario of a local war at the intersection of world religions and the interests of superpowers and contenders for any significant influence. Drug trafficking, illegal migration channels, the black market of weapons and human organs, the participation of world banks in this and the ways of intelligence cover for this policy have come together here.

The West deliberately changed the balance of power in the region in favour of structures oriented towards radical Islam, and by all means weakened the Orthodox segment, which is a resource of Russia's influence in the Balkans.

Afghanistan, as another theatre of military operations, largely repeated the patterns of the war in the Balkans for the United States. The only factor that was not used was the factor of confessional discord: the motivation of tribal hostility prevailed over the common Sunni identity.

Ethnic discord remained the main fuel of the conflict: each ethnic group saw the fate of Afghanistan in its own way. It's precisely this that created opportunities for the United States and Britain to play their usual games in the Afghan space. In this, the similarity of Afghanistan and the Balkans remained.

Drug trafficking, the threat of terrorist exports, the black market of weapons, uncontrolled migration, obstruction of competitors' trade communications – all this was an instrument of a strong position gained as a result of the introduction of US troops into Afghanistan. This is how it was seen in Washington in 2001.

That mechanism of the soft dictatorship of the ultra-liberal globalist clan, which is now being improved already in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, was established precisely after (and thanks to) the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

Using the image of the enemy in the form of a terrorist radical Islamism created by the West itself, the ruling circles of the United States persistently and consistently promote a strategy appealing to the urgency of curtailing all the democratic procedures that humanity has developed in the process of wars and revolutions of the last three centuries.

Now Islamism as the main enemy of liberalism in the propaganda of the West has somewhat dimmed and has receded into the background, giving way to the new bogeymen of Russia and China, painted as "authoritarian empires seeking to undermine the positions of democracy”.

The past 20 years have been years of struggle for a unipolar world under the auspices of the United States by methods of direct military-political and economic coercion to submission. Technologies were created for using mass communication media to demolish governments in other countries (colour revolutions), the sector of the so-called Big Tech became stronger – informational TNCs became a factor of political power. A symbiosis of financial and information technology segments of large capital has emerged, opposing segments related to the military-industrial complex and the oil industry.

One way or another, we are talking about the need for large international capital to switch to more direct and directive management technologies. Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and the COVID-19 pandemic are all stages of the great path that the world is following after the events of 1999 and especially the terrorist attack of 2001. Now the climate agenda is being added to this trend.

The concentration of global governance goes in different directions, but all paths converge on the idea of a new world order. Manipulations are becoming more crude and undisguised, global capital no longer hides its goals and means of achieving them.

The US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan does not mean the end of their struggle for a unipolar world. However, this struggle will become increasingly fierce. The world of chaos and humanitarian catastrophes, with the help of which the globalist elite of the United States imposes its hegemony, is built on the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent people around the world, including Americans – children, women, the elderly and young men who died in the prime of life. The number of physically and mentally disabled people cannot be accurately determined.

Such is the price of peace in the American way, but it seems that the US' rulers are not disturbed by this price. After all, they are still going to pay it with other people's lives.

Elena Panina-Director of the RUSSTRAT Institute