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August 28, 2009 (LPAC)—It is growing more and more clear that President Obama is on the verge of committing another, perhaps fatal policy blunder, this time having to do with Afghanistan. According to Washington sources, we are days or weeks away from a decision by the President to again escalate the U.S. troop deployments to Afghanistan, as soon as the U.S. and NATO forces commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, delivers his much-awaited recommendations. According to sources close to the Administration, McChrystal is certain to ask for more troops—an initial boost of 17,000 soldiers—and the President is likely to grant his request, despite warnings from some top advisors, including his National Security Advisor, Gen. James Jones.

According to one senior U.S. intelligence source, there is a broad institutional consensus that the United States cannot withdraw its forces from Afghanistan until a stable government has been secured in Kabul, and the Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgency has been defeated. "We have no choice, no matter who is President," the source recently reported. The source noted that there is no longer any distinction between the Taliban and the drug lords, who are behind the opium and heroin production, that accounts for 95 percent of the world's black market supply.

This irrational "institutional consensus" was on full display on Wed., Aug. 26, at a Brookings Institution event, featuring some top Obama Administration Afghan policy advisors. Bruce Reidel, the chairman of President Obama's Afghan task force; Michael O'Hanlon, an advisor to Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom commander; Anthony Cordesman, a Pentagon advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Kimberly Kagan, wife of "surge" author Fred Kagan and herself a leading neocon, all rationalized why there would be no pullout or draw-down of forces from Afghanistan—for at least the next five years—without providing a single explanation for why U.S. and NATO forces remain in Afghanistan, eight years after the 9/11 attacks, or what an exit strategy would even look like. In fact, Reidel and Cordesman candidly admitted that the U.S. and NATO could be defeated militarily, and that the current situation on the ground is already dire.

Briefed on these developments, Lyndon LaRouche had a clear explanation for why the United States is stuck in Afghanistan. "The British have lured us into this trap, and they want us to stay there until we have failed, altogether." LaRouche noted that, since the time of the Seven Years War (1757-1763), when the British Empire first emerged in its current form, the British have pursued a policy of inducing targeted nations to destroy themselves by being trapped into wars they have no business fighting. "The British manipulate the United States from the outside—not through some little conspiratorial cabal. Look at the case of Vietnam. When President John F. Kennedy accepted the wise advise of top American retired generals, including Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, never to get caught in a land-war in Asia, and began plans to withdraw the United States forces from Indochina, the British assassinated him. After that, as Lyndon Johnson candidly admitted in his final interview before his death, JFK's successor plunged headlong into Vietnam—out of fear of the assassins' bullets that took down Kennedy.

"Now," LaRouche continued, "we are once again being lured into a land war in Asia. It is Vietnam all over again, and the British are pushing us deeper and deeper in. The enemy is not fundamentally Taliban and Al Qaeda. The real enemy, the real threat, comes from the British Empire. If you don't have a top-down understanding of the role of the British, and the specific kinds of manipulations they run—like Tony Blair's 'sexed-up' Iraq disinformation dossiers in 2002—you will almost invariably fall into the trap."

LaRouche concluded, "Every war since the middle of the 18th Century, that has erupted, anywhere on the planet, has been manipulated by the British. That is how they operate. They exploit the ideological blinders, the petty hatreds, and induce nations to self-destruct. Often, they take actions that appear to jeopardize Britain itself, to win their objectives. This is what the Harold Wilson government did in 1967-68, when they wrecked the pound sterling. They did it to induce the United States to abandon the Bretton Woods System altogether—which is exactly what Richard Nixon, under the sway of George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, did in 1971. In 1992 again, the British had their little Nazi-collaborator puppet, George Soros, run a $2 billion attack on the pound sterling, which busted up the quasi-fixed-exchange European Rate Mechanism. The breakup of the ERM was the pivotal event, that opened continental Europe up for self-destruction, under the Maastricht Treaty.

"This is how the British Empire operates. And unless some people around the White House wise up soon, the United States is going to be dragged even deeper into a catastrophic failure in Afghanistan. There is no alternative to victory—victory over the British Empire."