KEVIN McKenna’s superb piece (Who are the real savages – the Taliban or Britain and the US?, Aug 18) hits several nails on the head. In all the reportage of the unfolding Afghan tragedy, there is no mention of its true origins: Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski created the mess in Afghanistan, by initiating a multibillion-dollar CIA covert operation to arm, train and equip the Taliban to fight the Soviets.

In doing so he sidelined the secular, democratic opposition and assured the Taliban’s ascendency, along with the spread of radical Islam into central Asia, after Soviet withdrawal. The American empire, in desperately trying to destroy its own creation after the blowback of 9/11, destroyed Afghanistan and much of the region. This included bombing the Islamic State cave complex in Afghanistan that the CIA had invested millions in building and fortifying.

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In their deranged exploits, the idiot-savants who run the Anglo-American imperial project are following a strategy designed by the mad imperialist geographer Sir Halford MacKinder (Oxford, naturally), who wrote in 1919: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

This recipe for world domination, hegemony of Eurasia (the World-Island), has driven the Anglo-American dangerous lunacy ever since.

Brzezinski helpfully explained it all in his highly revealing 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (note the “game” idiom) where he openly expounded: “For America the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia”.

So forget all the rubbish about “seeking justice for women and girls”, and “creating democracy”. The Great Game is, as it always has been, about wealth, power and world domination.

As we watch this mad, bad scheme unwind, we must resolve even more urgently to extricate Scotland from any further sacrifice of our young to this evil Anglo-American imperialist madness.

Dr John O’Dowd
Bothwell