The president upheld as a principle the insistence that the American people will be told nothing about what is being planned, how many troops will be sent or how long they will remain. Trump’s speech was most significant for its assertion of what amounts to a presidential-military dictatorship. The ruling class is acutely aware that it confronts its greatest enemy within the United States in the form of the American working class. Increasingly, American imperialism is directing its focus on larger competitors such as Russia, China and even Germany. This includes Afghanistan, where successive US governments have failed to establish control through bloody violence. This very delusion, over the course of 25 years of unending war since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has produced one debacle after another for the American ruling class-across the Middle East, in North Africa and beyond. There is a large element of derangement in the notion that American imperialism can resolve its mounting economic, social and geopolitical crises by dropping more bombs and killing more people. Everywhere the American ruling class looks it sees current or potential enemies. In an ominous warning of what is being planned, Trump proclaimed that under his administration “many billions of dollars more is being spent on our military, and this includes vast amounts being spent on our nuclear arsenal and missile defense.”īehind all the bombast, a combination of demoralization and fear pervaded Trump’s speech. The speech was delivered as the administration debates launching a preemptive strike against North Korea. The growing tensions between the United States and its nominal allies in Europe were reflected in Trump’s demand that NATO countries contribute more troops and resources to an expanded Afghan war. Trump threatened Pakistan and sided openly with India amidst mounting conflicts between the two countries and between India and China. It was, in effect, a declaration of war on the world. Trump’s speech, however, was not simply about Afghanistan. In other words, the carnage already inflicted on the Afghan people will pale in comparison to what is coming. All restrictions on operations “that prevented the secretary of defense and commanders in the field from fully and swiftly waging battle against the enemy” will be lifted. Trump declared that he will give the military “the necessary tools and rules of engagement” to defeat any resistance. This violence will be dramatically escalated, with a carte blanche commitment by Trump to provide whatever troops and resources the US military command deems necessary. Under Bush, Obama and now Trump, the US military has carried out countless atrocities and war crimes-from the November 2001 massacre of 800 Taliban prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif, to the 2002 slaughter of 48 people at a wedding party in Kakarak, the murder of 42 medical personnel and patients at a Doctors Without Borders medical center in Kunduz in 2015, and the dropping of the Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb, the largest nonnuclear weapon in the US arsenal, in Nangarhar Province this past April. Since the Bush administration launched the US invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001, 175,000 people have been killed, according to conservative estimates, and millions more driven from their homes. Trump’s new policy in Afghanistan, unveiled in a nationally televised address Monday evening, is a declaration of open-ended and unrestrained military violence against a country that has suffered sixteen years of unbroken American aggression.
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