Dirty Game

There is a plethora of literature around criticizing the Pakistan armed forces and the defence budget. Critics in their naiveté, overlook the reality that the defence budget is allocated to defending a state’s territorial boundaries and keeping the nation safe from external aggression. With this premise, one would like to draw attention to the most contentious roles played by a few armies in the world, creating conflicts for their own employability. These militaries suck the blood of their citizens—using their tax money, and impose wars on other countries’ innocent citizens. It’s not a cliché or social media news, but a statement of a former CIA contractor and academic, Chalmers Johnson:‘I guarantee you, when war becomes that profitable, you’re going to see more of it’.

Can we question the relatibility of recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a former CIA contractor? In 2001, the war planning cell under the President George W. Bush administration pushed its armies into decades-long conflicts in these two countries with a false claim of transforming them into western-friendly and liberal democracies. Was it a legit claim or there was a clandestine rationale behind it?

The CNN described the war in Afghanistan as a ‘catalog of waste, fraud, and abuse’ costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The US administration and its media are trying their best to build up a narrative that the war’s ignominious ending is someone else’s fault.’

The Pentagon, or Department of Defence, and its leadership are always looking for pretexts to protect human rights or defend democracies around the world, as if they were hired to do so. Under the guise of the ‘universal principles of democracy’, Pentagon’s policymakers really defende the never-ending flow of money through continuous (self-created) conflicts around the world. Jon Schwarz claimed that the 20-year Afghanistan war was an ‘extraordinary success’ for the top five U.S. defence contractors despite the American strategic defeat. Xin Ping in Global Times further explained how the ‘iron-triangle’ of arms dealers, congressmen and the Pentagon, benefited the American Military-Industrial Complex (AMIC)—a group of arms companies comprising Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. It was the AMIC behind these unnecessary wars.

Ping claims that the AMIC stock had increased in value by ten times or more, surpassing the stock market by 58 percent. Within the past two decades the war had made the AMIC buildi-up their bloody empire standing on the pillars of Afghan skeletons. Different studies suggest that a $10,000 investment in these five companies on Sept.18, 2001—the day President George W. Bush signed the bill authorizing the use of military force in a foreign land—would have shot up to $97,795 in 2021.

The graphic depiction of the exorbitant increase in the American budget over the two-decade-long war in Afghanistan is shown above from a BBC story .

Fred Kaplan refuted the surge in the defence budget due to wars. He described it as an American strategic move to contain China and Russia so that modern artillery and new and expensive fighter jets, bombers, missiles, ships, and submarines could be included in American arsenals. According to his analysis, the taxpayers were ‘lawfully’ squeezed to protect the strategic interests of America and not to benefit the AMIC. Nevertheless, his argument has no merit; it illustrates the American dirty game of power politics, which involves bombing poor nations like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen as proxy battlegrounds. The chessboard of wars against Russia and China is nothing more than an American excuse to impose unnecessary burden on the American taxpayer by denying people free access to basic services such as healthcare, employment, and education. As a matter of fact, these wars have stuffed hundreds of billions of dollars into the coffers of five defence contractors.

Even after the US exit from Afghanistan, the AMIC has continued to benefit, necessitating fresh contributions in terms of surveillance and intelligence equipment and gadgets. Biden’s statement about America’s greater role in global affairs, which includes ‘over the horizon’ tactics and demands constant US monitoring so that the evolving situation in Afghanistan can be monitored, is based on more AMIC contracts and money flowing into its accounts.

America will continue to foment wars and conflicts in order to benefit the AMIC. Ethiopia is the latest testing ground for American agencies, which are fanning the flames of violence. US taxpayers are paying for ‘westernized democracy’ in another country and emptying their pockets. There is some solace in the fact that money will return to America, albeit not to the people, but to AMIC.