American writer: Afghanistan pull-out should signal global imperial retreat

American writer and political analyst John W. Whitehead says pulling US troops out of Afghanistan is not enough, the American Empire must bring all troops home and put an end to endless wars.   

Whitehead, who is the founder and president of the Rutherford Institute, is the author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. He made these remarks in a recent article published by the Rutherford Institute website.

“It’s time to bring all our troops home. Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia,” Whitehead wrote.

“It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date,” he added.

“It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars,” he continued.

He stated that out of more than 1.3 million US military men and women on active duty, “more than 200,000 of them [are] stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.”

He noted that the “numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of ‘operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.’”

The analyst observed that “America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite.”

He stated that “America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually.”

“This is how a military empire occupies the globe,” he pointed out.

He wrote that the US has pulled out from Afghanistan after 20 years of war there but those troops “represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.”

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"In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere," he said. 

"This is how the military-industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense," he argued. 

Tens of thousands of US forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and removed the Taliban from power. American forces occupied the country for about two decades on the pretext of fighting against the Taliban. But as the US forces left Afghanistan, the Taliban stormed into Kabul, weakened by continued prolonged foreign occupation.

The Taliban are now poised to run Afghanistan again two decades after they were removed from power by American forces following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded several Islamic countries and killed hundreds of thousands of people there.

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