Great Satan US has no intention of leaving Afghanistan

An analyst tells Press TV that the United States government and its military do not have any plans to stop the killing of Afghan people and leave Afghanistan.

A US assassination drone attack has killed two people in northern Afghanistan. The drone strike killed two Afghans in the province of Kunduz on Tuesday. According to statistics published by icasualties.org earlier in the day, 398 foreign soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in 2012, compared to 2001 when the total death toll for foreign troops stood at 12. The United States and Britain bore most of the brunt of the Taliban attacks in 2012, as 309 US troops and 44 British forces were killed. The foreign fatalities for the year also included 45 soldiers from other NATO member countries. Afghan forces have also suffered a large number of casualties since the US-led invasion of the country in 2001.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Mohammad Daoud Abedi, chairman of Afghan Nation Peace Council, regarding the issue. What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: First of all, I would like to get your opinion on these drone attacks. We have seen an increase in these attacks in Afghanistan. The civilian population is the one that is bearing the brunt. Why does the US keep doing so, considering the reaction pouring out is nothing but anti-American sentiment?

Abedi: Thank you for inviting me for this interview. As I have said before and as the world has said before, this is the license to kill without any kind of responsibility. The US government has been doing this in the past 12 years, killing many civilians on both sides of the line, killing mostly the Afghan civilians.

Unfortunately, this is an illegal operation that has been happening and they are planning to do this continuously all the way to whichever they want to do, I believe. Unfortunately, they think they can win this war by killing civilians. Actually, these attacks are revenges from the loss that the US government has faced in Afghanistan.

Usually the Mujahidin are in the villages around the country and they attack these convoys of military machinery. Once they attacked that, they slide away in the mountains of Afghanistan, then these pilots come after 45 minutes and they just keep bombarding and hitting the villages, taking the revenge, saying that you are the people that are supporting these Mujahidin in these mountainous areas. So therefore if you do not want us to attack you, do not let the Mujahidin come into your area.

Unfortunately, this is an illegal war. Many organizations have spoken in this regard and they have given their views that this is an illegal attack; it is a license to kill without any kind of responsibility and they are just making enemies for themselves.

Press TV: The US continues to use these drones in countries like Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Do you think, when it leaves Afghanistan, the drones will become a weapon of choice for the Americans to continue to control the things in Afghanistan?

Abedi: Actually, it has already become a choice for the war. The drones are being sold everywhere, actually if you might have heard the news, they sold four pieces of these killing machines to South Korea to monitor the border there.

The US, as far as I am concerned, is not planning yet to leave. You might have heard the news that they are training 300 helicopter pilots in Colorado which has a landscape like Afghanistan. They are planning to have these 300 pilots running the war from up in the sky.

So I think they are planning to win a war from the sky and fortunately, there is no way. You can bomb a country to the Stone Age but once you get the boots on the ground, you will pay the price and that is what exactly has happened to the US military in Afghanistan. They bombed; they carpet-bombed; they put 2000-pound bombs on people but still when they got their boots on the ground, as you can see, they are defeated.

The entire occupation forces of NATO have been defeated in Afghanistan. There is no way for them to succeed in Afghanistan. Actually today, Mr. [mentions the name of the coordinator for Afghan Nation Peace Council], the coordinator for the Peace Council; it was his words that in all sides have come to this point that there is no military solution for Afghanistan war which means that this military machine that is killing Afghan civilians left and right has understood that even with this kind of wild killing of Afghans, they are not going to win the war.

So it is best for them to understand and come to the reality of understanding that they will not win the war; they must stop this killing and leave Afghanistan, so the neighborhood in that area could become a peaceful neighborhood.

Press TV: We have seen Hamid Karzai time and time again condemned the US for killing civilians specifically with regards to these airstrikes that are carried out. How do you see any future Afghan government, Karzai or not, once the US leaves, responding to the drone attacks if they continue?

Abedi: Actually the reason the US wants to keep these residual forces in Afghanistan is for the purpose of these drone attacks so they could fly from the airports of east and south of Afghanistan and attack the Mujahidin everywhere.

Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, and the Afghan puppet president both condemned continuously in the past 12 years but that is just a part to play the national card telling the Afghan and the Pakistani people that we are against this but what can we do?

Secretly, they have already agreed to this; they have signed to them; they have given allowance to these people to kill their nation. They are both two puppets in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They cannot tell their masters not to do this. What they are saying is just to fool the Afghan people, nothing.