Noam Chomsky

Meanwhile, the Taliban found that the coffers in the Central Bank’s offices in Kabul were empty; the reserves—$9.5 billion—sat in U.S. banks, from which they were now seized by the United States to pay off the families of victims of the 9/11 attack. During the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan relied for its revenues on foreign aid, 43 percent of Afghan GDP in 2020. This collapsed as the United States withdrew; the UN Development Programme calculates a drop in the GDP because of the loss of foreign aid to be 20 percent (2021) and then 30 percent in the following years. Meanwhile, the United Nations estimates that by the end of 2022 the country’s per capita income may decline to nearly half of 2012 levels. It is estimated that 97 percent of the Afghan people will fall below the poverty line, with mass starvation a real possibility

More than $2 trillion has been spent on the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, but it went neither to provide relief nor to build the country’s infrastructure. The money fattened the wallets of the rich in the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Shock and Awe

During the U.S. war on the Philippines in 1898, General Jacob Smith ordered his troops to “kill everyone over the age of ten” and create a “howling wilderness.” A half-century later, in Vietnam, a U.S. helicopter team painted the slogan “Death is our Business and Business is Good”

Noam Chomsky’s American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and The Backroom Boys (1973).

(Syntactic Structures, 1957; Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 1964; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965; Cartesian Linguistics, 1965)

You can’t raise the question of courage about people as privileged as I am. You want to look at courage, go to the peasants fighting for their lives in southern Colombia, or the courage of the Kurds in eastern Turkey, or the Palestinians in the refugee camps and in the occupied territories. Places where you—as a journalist—have spent most of your life. There, you can talk about courage. Not for people like me.

If you take a look at the last part of the Pentagon Papers, the part that nobody reads that comes right after the Tet Offensive, it says that there was a discussion about sending more troops. But the joint chiefs were not eager. They said, “If you send more troops, we’re going to need them for civil disorder control in the United States. Women, young people: they’re going to be revolting all over the place. We can’t send more troops abroad.” That’s the last couple of pages of the Pentagon Papers. There was real concern about this, and they called off the trials of the resistance. So, I was never tried.

the United States dropped three times as many bombs by weight on Vietnam than were dropped in both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II; the explosive impact of the ordinance dropped on Vietnam was a hundred times the combined impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs.

The United States conducted a “secret” bombing campaign against Laos from 1964 to 1973 to support the Royal Lao regime against the Pathet Lao and to prevent the alleged use of Laos by the Vietnamese to resupply lines in the south of Vietnam. The United States conducted 580,000 bombing missions, dropping a full payload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years. The country is considered the most bombed on the planet.