“We could win that war so fast if I wanted to kill 10 million people … which I don’t. I’m not looking to kill a big portion of that country [Afghanistan],”
“I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone,”
“It would be over in — literally, in 10 days. And I don’t want to do — I don’t want to go that route.” (ABC July 24.2019) (emphasis added)
“As I’ve said, and I’ll say it any number of times – and this is not using nuclear – we could win that war in a week if we wanted to fight it, but I’m not looking to kill 10 million people,” (quoted by Press TV, Aug 21.2019) (emphasis added)
***
Should these cynical statements be taken seriously?
Since president Trump now has come out and openly admitted that plans for a genocide are contemplated, it is reasonable to look at what practical means the US military machine has for implementing this criminal undertaking, which is tantamount to genocide.
Ten million is a lot of people to kill without using nuclear weapons. Even a decade of war in Indochina, with massive aerial bombing, only managed to kill an estimated 4 million people, so an air campaign in Afghanistan would be insufficient to achieve something on this scale. Other governments who tried similar projects, found out that it takes time and effort; using death squads, murder on such a scale would take several years; use of chemical means would require an impractical concentration of the targeted populations. Starvation is a tried and tested method, but would obviously require more than 10 days.
Basically, it could not be done quickly with conventional means, and since Trump claimed there are no nuclear weapons involved, it leaves the US military with few options. Disregarding futuristic weapons programs, the only known things that can achieve something similar are – biological weapons.
In 2010 the US Air Force published a counterproliferation paper,”Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens“, where it discussed several biological weapons threats, carefully framing the problem as a defense against these. The traditional way of dispersal, perfected since the early trials in the Korean war, is mentioned: “using a single bomber and with the right weather conditions on an unprotected population, a 10 ton biological agent dispersed in the environment could affect an area equal to 100,000 km2″, (p6) (the size of Indiana)
But there is obviously a flaw to releasing a ‘normal’ super-virus able to kill 10 million people in a short period of time – namely how would they stop it from spreading to the rest of the world?
Even if they could hermetically seal Afghanistan, there are international aid workers, mercenaries, local collaborators and others there that the US would not want harmed. The Air Force paper tells us:
In 1997, a study was conducted to identify future threats and uses of advanced biological warfare agents. The JASON group, composed of academic scientists, served as technical advisers to the U. S. government. Their study generated six broad classes of genetically engineered pathogens that could pose serious threats to society. These include but are not limited to binary biological weapons, designer genes, gene therapy as a weapon, stealth viruses, host-swapping diseases, and designer diseases.
So we get possibilities like:
Stealth Viruses: The basic concept of this potential bioweapon is to “produce a tightly regulated, cryptic viral infection that can enter and spread in human cells using vectors” (similar to the gene therapy) and then stay dormant for a period of time until triggered by an internal or external signal. The signal then could stimulate the virus to cause severe damage to the system. Stealth viruses could also be tailored to secretly infect a targeted population for an extended period using the threat of activation to blackmail the target [p15] (emphasis added)
The Air Force paper discusses the possibility of a «disease that could wipe out the whole population or a certain ethnic group.» The paper states that unlike nuclear weapons, “a biological warfare program has no unambiguous signatures to differentiate its legitimacy for conducting biotechnology research vis-à-vis research for offensive military biological weapons.”
Given that the United States is going for bust in its quest for Full Spectrum Dominance, there is a high likelihood that if such weapons can be produced, the US will have them – and if we interpret president Trump this way, they already have been deployed.
And would someone ever stoop so low as to use humanitarian programs as a cover for warfare activities? It is worth recalling sham hepatitis B vaccine program used by the CIA to collect DNA in the neighborhood where bin Laden was hiding, creating massive mistrust in the local population against all vaccine programs.
One thing I found particularly shocking when researching this article, was the substantial support Trump’s genocidal words found in the reader comments in corporate Western media. Perhaps one can’t expect anything else when Afghans consistently have been depicted in popular culture as murderous, frothing fanatics, from a “shithole country”, all deserving to die for rather tenuous links to a crime (the events Sept 11. 2001) that happened before most Afghans were born.
Being so demonized, the Afghan population would be especially easy testing ground for biological warfare. Foreign armies and intelligence services have had free hand to prepare anything they might want for 18 years now.
That biological research targeting specific ethnic groups is an area of research that is ongoing and not limited to only some parts of the world, was highlighted again in 2017, when the US Air Force got exposed seeking to obtain genetic and tissue samples that are “collected from Russia and must be Caucasian” and would “not consider tissue samples from Ukraine.”
The head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, warned in 2015 of “the production of military oriented biological weapons and the very large funding allocated to this,“ where he especially mentioned biolabs in former Soviet republics. “This is tens of billions of dollars. Additionally, the number of laboratories under US jurisdiction or control has increased 20 times.” (emphasis added)
Trump’s threats, possibly meant as a blunt bargaining tool in peace talks with the Taliban, may have revealed more than he intended. If the international community ever should be strong enough to impose a Nuremberg-like trial, this is prime evidence.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
This article was originally published on Midt i fleisen.
Terje Maloy is a Norwegian/Australian blogger and translator. This article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial purposes.
