But what, I asked General Gul, in his view, were the true reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan, and why the US is still there? “A very good question,” he responded. “I think you have reached the point precisely. It is a principle of war that you never mix objectives. Because when you mix objectives then you end up with egg on your face. You face defeat. And here was a case where the objectives were mixed up. Ostensibly, it was to disperse al Qaeda, to get Osama bin Laden. But latently, the reasons for the offensive, for the attack on Afghanistan, were quite different.”

First, he says, the US wanted to “reach out to the Central Asian oilfields” and “open the door there,” which “was a requirement of corporate America, because the Taliban had not complied with their desire to allow an oil and gas pipeline to pass through Afghanistan.

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"because the Taliban had not complied with their desire to allow an oil and gas pipeline to pass through Afghanistan. "