While condemnations for Iraq's occupation continue to dominate the headlines, Afghanistan has slipped beyond the radar screens of both the so-called mainstream media as well as the anti-war, independent web bloggers, who are the only serious critics of the United States bloody adventures abroad. For the most part political thinkers and critics of the American empire on the left have also approved the official story about 9/11 and the rationale behind the war and occupation of Afghanistan.

For the first time in modern history, the occupation of a sovereign state has been globally accepted as fully legitimate. The occupying tyrants have been given a free hand to terrorize, kill, capture and abuse all those under the label of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda who stand against aggression and occupation.

The global silence and assumed legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is tied and directly proportional to the Taliban's presumed illegitimacy. There is hardly anyone willing to go behind the concocted stories and biased reports which laid the foundation of the Taliban's presumed illegitimacy. The co-opted media and other vested interests played a pivotal role in generating damning reports about the Taliban.

The U.S. policies and media campaigns from the Taliban period have turned the world against even the slightest idea of living by Islam. These lies and misconceptions have pitted Muslims against each other and divided Pakhtoon on both sides of the defunct Durand Line to an extent that history has never seen.

The minds infected with years of media campaign now consider the United States invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as a benevolent exercise towards a prosperous future. Whereas those who are aware of the realities on the ground know that it is far worse than the Soviet occupation, which was, at least, reviewed and condemned at the United Nations on almost a weekly basis. With a few exceptions, the rest of the world really considered it an illegitimate occupation.

Fast forward to the 21st century and we find battered Bush, who sees his support for the war on Iraq ebbing away due to relentless pressure by the many non-partisan and anti-war individuals and organizations. Surprisingly, however, the war goes on in Afghanistan without any meaningful criticism from any quarter. The reason is that those, who criticize the voluminous lies and deceptions of the Bush administration regarding the Iraq war, are actually unwitting victims of much bigger lies with regards to the war of aggression on Afghanistan.

Researchers working on events of 9/11 agree that there are holes in the official story of 9/11, but there is hardly anyone who is committed to connecting the dots to see that the bloody drama of 9/11 was staged in order to create a pretext for invading Afghanistan. Even as promoting the idea Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were used for paving the way to invade Iraq, so was 9/11 used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan. The justification for Iraq war has been extensively debated and exposed as a lie, whereas there is a marked silence and an acceptance of the official justification for invading and occupying Afghanistan. Many researchers are drawing the conclusion that 9/11 was an "inside job" from the facts surrounding the mysterious collapse of WTC towers and the "stand down" of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). In this regard, the why is just as important as the how.

In fact, deceptions surrounding justification for Afghanistan invasion are so pervasive and widely accepted as facts that very few can realize that roots of the actual 21st century crusade lie in the way the war was imposed on Afghanistan in 2001. Invasion of Afghanistan was the first military step towards institutionalizing the war against a faith based on praxis, rather than theoretical theological formulations. In the case of Iraq, the motives seems slightly different due to a mix of arrogance, revenge and greed. In the case of Afghanistan, however, the motivation of the warlords in Washington can hardly be concealed. The motivation for the war of aggression purely came from the crusading spirit which would never allow Muslims to live by Islam or establish an Islamic society and a model of governance that would lead to a domino effect in the Muslim world and help Muslims get re-united as a single Ummah, rather than remain divided in 57 states and suffering individually.

This institutionalization of the war against a faith based on praxis, rather than theoretical theological formulations, needs to be clearly understood, because without such an understanding nothing can be done to turn the tide. Fully influenced by the years-long anti-Taliban propaganda, many of the independent researchers of the 9/11 attacks are quite effective in exposing the facts, but they are hardly able to link 9/11 with the real motives of the culprits. The researchers, for example, establish that the United States government actually lied and that 9/11 was an "inside" job. However, they hardly ask: Why did the insiders do it?

The only difference between the lies about 9/11 and Saddam's WMD is in the choice of the target countries. The way the lies about WMD have proved that the Iraq war was planned long before the actual efforts to make public opinion in favor of the needless aggression, the official story about 9/11 proves that invading Afghanistan was on the cards long before the staged attacks for commencing the long awaited crusade.

The more the United States administration and the so-called mainstream media attempt to cover the real culprits behind 9/11 and refuse to answer some basic questions regarding the tragedy, the more it becomes evident that the main objective of the staged terrorist attacks was to invade and occupy Afghanistan for blowing a serious blow to Muslims' reawakening, rather than smoking out "terrorists."

There is no other explanation. Sane minds would never commit the heinous crimes of this magnitude against their own people without the hope of achieving higher objectives than mere oil and pipelines-objectives, which they may consider worth killing 3000 Americans and destroying the landmark buildings in New York and hitting Pentagon in Washington. This book digs out the facts to show the real motives behind the staged 9/11 attacks and the consequences of our considering the United States invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as legitimate.

Even those who do not agree with independent researchers in the United States, who have concluded that 9/11 attacks were staged, can hardly deny that the United States administration had, at the very least, prior knowledge of what was coming. However, the question that most of the analysts ignore is that if the administration lied, if the administration ignored warnings, or if the administration actually setup 9/11, why did it do so? What was the motive? What did it want to gain from committing, assisting or allowing the perpetrators to commit the barbaric acts against its own people? The answer is simple: to pave the way for invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for which the administration could not come up with a convincing pretext. The answer to the next question, "Why Afghanistan?" lies in the explanation given in the following pages.