Why the War in Afghanistan based on a Fraudulent Claim of Humanitarian Intervention.

Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, gave a rousing defence of Britain's military involvement in Afghanistan on the Today programme this morning, arguing – with some justification – that the Afghans are now in a better position to take charge of their own affairs than they were when the Nato mission got underway in the summer of 2006. 

So opines Con Coughlin in The Telegraph . in A peace deal with the Taliban is crucial for Britain's successful withdrawal from Afghanistan ) The Afghans who are now to "take charge" of their destiny involve the Taliban. Down the Orwellian memory hole has gone all the gibberish that this war was ever about "women's rights" or "humanitarian intervention" Such phrases are no longer even used in the public discussion on the war.

So having gone in to Afghanistan back in 2001 in order to remove the Taliban, held to be in league with Al Qaida, the British public are now being told that the women hating "Islamofascists" that were continually cited as the enemy of the West to be defeated are  to be negotiated with. Meaning either the war aims have failed or that something else was always at stake.

In fact this inevitable "deal" with the Taliban  proves that the war was thus never a "humanitarian intervention". So why did the conflict drag on so long? The reason is that the deal being struck is about securing the construction of the TAPI pipeline.That was clear when the minister of energy in Kabul said as much to the respected journalist Lutz Kleveman in his The New Great Game.

While the war in Afghanistan was never from the outset only about securing what US Stste Department documents and Hilary Clinton refer to as "The New Silk Route". It was a major war objective.

The latest evidence is that the TAPI Pipeline, a project that will block off the need for the building of the rival Iranian to Pakistan pipeline, will be complete by 2017. Troops and special forces will remain in Afghanistan to facilitate this process.Hammond does not actually state troops will be withdrawn. He uses the Orwellian can phrase troop drawdown.

The British public have been lied to as much as the war objectives in Afghanistan as they were in Iraq. The Fourth Afghan War is crucially concerned with energy geopolitics and encircling and containing Iran.This nations stands in the way of Western hegemony over Central Asia and the Middle East and its oil and gas reserves.

AJP Taylor in The Troublemakers once wrote that no Establishment foreign policy had ever remained unchallenged. It is a sad sign of the state of British democracy that the war objectives were never publicly debated not stated clearly. The siren voices for "liberal intervention" are now nowhere to be heard. The endgame in the construction of the TAPI pipeline.