Afghan folk singer Fawad Andarabi was a local artist who had been dragged from his house and shot dead by Taliban.
The artist was quite renowned in the Andarabi Valley and played a bowed flute (ghichak) succeeding in entertaining the residents and making the atmosphere lively.
He was shot in the head on a farm. The Taliban had come to Fawad’s house and decided to search his residence, later on Taliban even had tea with the singer.
The family is named after the Andarabi Valley which is located in the Baghlan province. Fawad’s son Jawad ask justice for his father and has also been promised by a local Taliban authority that justice will be served.
Fawad Andarabi enjoyed quite a lot of popularity in the valley due to playing the ‘ghichak’ with expertise and singing entertaining songs regulating around his birthplace and the Afghani community.
If the empire disbanded, much as the British empire did, and retreated to focus on the ills that beset the United States it could free itself from its death spiral. But those who manipulate the levers of empire are unaccountable. They are hidden from public view and beyond public scrutiny. They are determined to keep playing the great game, rolling the dice with lives and national treasure
Millions of Afghans have been displaced by the war. Photo: MikrofonNews
Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.
Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.
Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
The U.S. and other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding aid and recognition gave them “very considerable leverage – economic, diplomatic and political” over the Taliban.
Western politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some power in the new government, and that Western influence and interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return. This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros, but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.
To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies’ 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban.
The reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop over 80,000 bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years.
Since the United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for U.S. soldiers wounded in Afghanistan already amount to over $175 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could eventually top a trillion dollars.
So what about “rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated $144 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security forces” that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent between 2008 and 2017 was documented as “waste, fraud and abuse” by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The crumbs left over, less than 2% of total U.S. spending on Afghanistan, amount to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the Afghan people in economic development, healthcare, education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid.
But, as in Iraq, the government the U.S installed in Afghanistan was notoriously corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked U.S.-occupied Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the world.
Western readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in Afghanistan, as opposed to a particular feature of the U.S. occupation, but this is not the case. TI notes that ”it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels.” A 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that “corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations.”
Those administrations would include the Taliban government that U.S. invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist governments that were overthrown by the U.S.-deployed precursors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they had made in education, healthcare and women’s rights.
A 2010 report by former Reagan Pentagon official Anthony H. Cordesman, entitled “How America Corrupted Afghanistan”, chastised the U.S. government for throwing gobs of money into that country with virtually no accountability.
The New York Timesreported in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with U.S. dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.
Corruption also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up as the successes of the occupation, like education and healthcare. The education system has been riddled with schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are stocked with fake, expired or low quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil servants like teachers earning only one-tenth the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and contractors.
Rooting out corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to the primary U.S. goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or extending its puppet government’s control. As TI reported, “The U.S. has intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information, and cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling grievances against the Afghan government and channelling material support to the insurgency.”
The endless violence of the U.S. occupation and the corruption of the U.S.-backed government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in rural areas where three quarters of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of occupied Afghanistan also contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.
Well before the current crisis, the number of Afghans reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018 Gallup poll found the lowest levels of self-reported “well-being” that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record levels of misery but also unprecedented hopelessness about their future.
Despite some gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan girls attended primary school in 2019 and only 37% of adolescent Afghan girls were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in Afghanistan is that more than two million children between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken families.
Yet instead of atoning for our role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three quarters of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP.
In effect, the United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second, economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their “leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other victims of U.S. economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran.
After pouring trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s main duty now is to help the 40 million Afghans who have not fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and trauma of the war America inflicted on them, as well as a massive drought that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third wave of covid-19.
The U.S. should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in U.S. banks. It should shift the $6 billion allocated for the now defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for $1.3 billion in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.
Once upon a time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat Germany and Japan, and then helped to rebuild them as healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s serious faults – its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries – America held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries around the world were ready to follow.
If all the United States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to be moving on and looking at new models to follow: new experiments in popular and social democracy; renewed emphasis on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use of military force to resolve international problems; and more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises like the Covid pandemic and the climate disaster.
The United States can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help to build.
Western media appear to be downplaying a possible major development in the Kabul airport attack. If the story of U.S. soldiers firing into the crowd after the suicide bombing is true, it would be a major development that deserves prominent media attention. Western news organizations with reporters on the ground have been publishing highly detailed accounts of events at the airport for days.
Listening to Australian pundits talk about the relationship of their country with the US – at least from a strategic perspective – can be a trying exercise. It is filled with angst, Freudian fears of abandonment, the strident megalomania of Australian self-importance. Critics of this complex are shouted down as Sinophiles or in the pay of some foreign power.
This unequal and distinctly unhealthy relationship has been marked by a certain outsourcing tendency. Australian foreign policy is a model example of expectation: that other powers will carry its weight: processing refugees; aiding Australians stranded or persecuted overseas; reliance on that fiction known as the extended nuclear deterrent. Self-reliance is discouraged in favour of what Barry Posen calls a “cheap ride”.
In recent years, the Australian security-military apparatus has been more than ingratiating regarding its alliance with Washington, despite such sombre warnings as those from the late Malcom Fraser. In 2014, the former prime minister argued that Australia, at the end of the Cold War, was presented with an opportunity to pursue a policy of “peace, cooperation, and trust” in the region. Instead, Canberra opted to cling on to a foreign war machine that found itself bloodied and bruised in the Middle East. Now, Australia risked needlessly going to war against China on the side of the US. Best to, he suggested, shut down US training bases in the Northern Territory and close the Pine Gap signals centre as soon as feasible.
During the Trump administration, a more than usually cringe worthy effort was made to be Washington’s stalking horse in the Asia-Pacific region. Poking China on such matters as COVID-19 was seen as very sensible fare, as it might invite a more solid commitment of the United States to the region. But the momentum for an easing of some US global commitments was impossible to reverse. The country was looking inward (the ravages of the COVID contagion, a country riven by protest and the toxic and intoxicating drug of identity politics). Those in Canberra were left worried.
This state of affairs has prompted the glum lament from the veteran strategist Hugh White that Australia’s politicians lack imagination in the face of the most significant change in its foreign relations since British settlement. They refuse to accept that China is there, not to be contained but to be accommodated in some form. The Pacific pond will have to accept two hegemons rather than one, a point the Washington-hugging types in Canberra find not only impermissible but terrifying.
The fall of Kabul offered further stimulus for panic. The Western war adventurers had been defeated and instead of asking why Australians were ever in Afghanistan, the focus shifted to the umbilical cord with Washington. In conducting interviews with four former Australian Prime Ministers, Paul Kelly of The Australian, being more woolly-headed than usual, saw Biden’s withdrawal as “so devoid of judgment and courage that it raises a fog of doubt about Biden himself and about America’s democratic sustenance as a reliable great power.”
Of the former prime ministers interviewed, the undying pugilist Tony Abbott wondered what “fight” was left in “Biden’s America”. There might well be some in the reserves, he speculated, but US allies had to adjust. Australia had to show “more spine” in the alliance.
Kevin Rudd, himself an old China hand, wanted to impress upon the Australian public and body politic that “we are in the midst of a profound paradigm shift in global and regional geopolitics.” The US continued to question itself about what strategic role it would play in the Asia-Pacific region in the face of China’s inexorable rise. Australia had to plan for the “best” and the “worst”: the former entailing “a robust regionally and globally engaged America”; the latter, “an America that begins to retreat.” On August 14, Rudd had urged the Biden administration to “reverse the course of its final military withdrawal”.
Malcolm Turnbull opted for the small troop thesis: “America should have retained a garrison force in Afghanistan.” Doing so might have provided sufficient assurance for Afghan national forces and prevented a Taliban victory. “It was not palatable to have kept forces there, but what we have seen now is even less palatable.” The US, he noted, had retained forces across European states, Japan and South Korea “for decades”. (Turnbull misses a beat here on such shaky comparisons, given that the Taliban would have never tolerated the presence of such a garrison.)
Trump comes in for a lecturing: “The [US-Taliban] talks should never have occurred in the absence of the Afghan government and their effect was to delegitimise that government.” In all fairness to the Trump administration, there was little by way of legitimacy in the Afghan national government to begin with. Negotiating with the Taliban was simply an admission as to where the bullets and bombs were actually coming from, not to mention how untenable the existence of the Kabul regime had become.
As for John Howard, the man who sent Australian forces to Afghanistan to begin with, the garrison thesis held even greater merit. Again, the false analogy of other US imperial footprints was drawn: if Washington can station 30,000 troops in South Korea for seven decades after the end of hostilities, why not Afghanistan? Hopefully, this “bungle” would remain confined to the handling of Afghanistan and not affect the US-Australian alliance. “I believe if it were put to the test, the Americans would honour the ANZUS treaty.”
Such reflections, part moaning, part regret, should provide brickwork for a more independent foreign policy. Alison Broinowski, former diplomat and Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform, offers some level-headed advice. “If Australians ignore the change in the global power balance that is happening before our eyes,” she writes, “we will suffer the consequences. If we can’t defeat the Taliban, how will we prevail in a war against China?” Such a question, given the terrifying answer that follows, is not even worth asking.
As soon as I heard Biden say, “We will hunt you down,” about the Afghan airport bombers, I knew that the US would immediately kill some Afghan women and children. The US will slaughter women and children at the drop of a smallpox blanket, an H-bomb, Agent Orange or a reaper drone. When the rampaging trillion-dollar-a-year military and surveillance empire feels it has been wronged there is no limit to its blood lust.
So today we have the report that the US drone-striked an Afghan family, killing six children, ages two to ten, and three adults. The empire’s mockingbird media will spin this as unfortunate but necessary and, no matter how much evidence the empire offers to the contrary, US serfs will believe that they have rights and freedoms and are a “model” for the world. So another story today won’t faze them any more than dead Afghan children:
Today former New York Times science writer Alex Berenson was permanently banned from the intelligence agency tentacle known as Twitter. Berenson tweeted that the covid vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission — which is exactly what the vaccine pushers themselves have said previously — the vaccines only lessen symptoms — but the little people aren’t allowed to tell truths about lockdowns or vaccines — vaccines developed and marketed at “warp speed” and so obviously harmless, useful and necessary that tens of millions of people have to be bribed, brainwashed, threatened, vilified, censored, entered in million dollar lotteries, thrown out of work and smashed back to feudalism in order for people to take them.
“Covid” is no more going to end than the war on terror ended. It’s too profitable, it’s a gold mine. Covid even has a bigger market — a potential 7 billion customers shot up with yearly boosters. Whenever the government declares a war something — Communism, drugs, cancer, terrorism — the war will be endless, highly profitable for a few, and send the working class majority running in fear farther and farther away from truth, health and answers.
The vaccine is your God. The vaccine is your government. The vaccine will decide how much 1st Amendment you get. The vaccine will decide how much freedom of movement you’re allowed. The vaccine is the be-all and end-all and you will have this piped into your brains 24/7 from every direction. If you want your Social Security checks and Medicare, take the shot. If you want to see a movie or eat at a restaurant, take the shot. If you want to travel, take the shot. If you want out of your house, take the shot. If you want us to let you live at all, take the shot. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” was one of the funniest jokes we ever told you. So long and so many freedoms ago…
Fighting a civil war about this suits us just fine. We have many more things we’d like to do to you as we get ready for the homeland calamity (not security) of the US dollar losing its reserve currency status. Unlike you beggars, we plan ahead. Many of you don’t even know where your next meal or tent encampment is coming from. We want this vaccine as bad as we wanted the Iraq War and if you don’t like it, you’re a traitor to health, freedom, old people and children — you are a pestilence that’s destroying our way of life. It feels really great to concentrate all of our problems on powerless little vermin like you. If you were gone, everything would be all right.
Probably sacrificing a bunch of you will make this plague go away. Follow the science. It’s not like we’re superstitious witch doctors. Wear your mask in the restaurant when you walk to your table because the virus floats up there whether you’re seven feet tall or five feet tall — when you sit down at your table, take your mask off because the virus isn’t there. Basically, the virus likes you sitting down, lying down, shutting up, staying home, shooting up, obeying and making Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos richer. What’s good for them is good for you and what’s good for you is doing everything we say when we say it even if it contradicts something we said five minutes ago — beating you down and getting you mindless is where we want you.
But the one true God is the vaccine. Take the poison, goddamn you. The Rev. Tony Fauci don’t know nothin’ about no gain of function research. Jesus, even people at Jonestown were more cooperative than you are. But we love you, we’re concerned about you. That’s why we prohibited millions of you from working and then watched you go broke, losing your jobs, homes and savings. That’s why we gave you Medicare for All. Oh, wait…
Just take the shot, we’ve got all kinds of things in store for you if you don’t. We’ve only just begun to fight, doctors and nurses will be our armies, they will vanquish you, hospitals will be our castles and the drawbridges will be pulled up on you unvaccinated polluted rabble. And stop being paranoid and libelous about good people like us, we’re the best people, we are so superior to you, it’s infuriating that we even have to explain ourselves — you’d think that we’ve maimed and killed people with DES, Oraflex, Vioxx or the Swine Flu vaccine — or killed innocent women and children with reaper drones. Alarmist know-nothings!
“Two weeks to flatten the curve…” If you were gone, everything would be all right. Hurry up and take the poison, goddam you. We have to make more progress. Tomorrow belongs to us!
The daily Jeddojehad (Struggle), a left-wing online Urdu-language paper is posting reports from Kabul. Filed by Yasmeen Afghan (not the author’s real name), these reports depict the picture from inside Kabul and cover what is often ignored in the mainstream media.
One man who knows more than most about the absurdities of the war is Joe Glenton. A former soldier in the British Army, he refused to return to Afghanistan, citing his moral objections to the conflict, for which refusal he served six months in a military jail. Joe Glenton joins Watchdog host Lowkey to discuss his experiences and the recent events in the country.
As we reflect on what has transpired in Afghanistan with the Taliban returning to power, we have a vital opportunity for a more authentic, coherent humanitarian response. Toward this end, we must engage some critical analysis and questions.
We might ask why the Afghanistan government didn’t adequately have the support of its people? How can the conditions and momentum be generated for such trust, consideration and inclusion? Why has this been an ongoing issue long before the drawdown of U.S. troops?
President Biden has done a very courageous act by significantly reducing the role of the U.S. military and committing to military withdrawal in a large-scale international conflict, even after 20 years of U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan.
But concern about motive does not detract from the need to support and strengthen the international protection of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the framework of international humanitarian law which followed it were endorsed by almost every nation. The absence of an international police force – a weakness in the structure – increases the need for individual states to share responsibility for enforcement, particularly of international criminal law. The development of a “responsibility to protect”, dismissed by Jenkins, gives legitimacy to necessary humanitarian intervention. Military action should be a last resort, but it cannot be ruled out of every situation where lives are at stake.
But concern about motive does not detract from the need to support and strengthen the international protection of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the framework of international humanitarian law which followed it were endorsed by almost every nation. The absence of an international police force – a weakness in the structure – increases the need for individual states to share responsibility for enforcement, particularly of international criminal law. The development of a “responsibility to protect”, dismissed by Jenkins, gives legitimacy to necessary humanitarian intervention. Military action should be a last resort, but it cannot be ruled out of every situation where lives are at stake.
Even as he planned to withdraw all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan by August 31, President Joe Biden said Saturday that the drone strike that was launched Friday night in retaliation for an attack claimed by ISIS-K “was not the last.”
“We will continue to hunt down any person involved in that heinous attack and make them pay,” the president said in a statement Saturday afternoon. “Whenever anyone seeks to harm the United States or attack our troops, we will respond. That will never be in doubt.”
The Pentagon said the drone strike killed two “planners and facilitators” of the explosion outside Kabul’s airport, but according toThe Guardian, in addition to targets related to the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an elder in Jalalabad reported that three civilians were killed and four were wounded in the U.S. strike.
The bombing on Thursday killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 U.S. service members, and prompted calls from anti-war groups and lawmakers including Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) for the U.S. to refrain from taking further military action in Afghanistan as two decades of the U.S.-led war there comes to an end.
Following the U.S. retaliatory strike on Friday, Ariel Gold of CODEPINK pointed out that even if no civilians were killed as the Pentagon is reporting, “these drone strikes help ISIS recruit.”
“This is not what ending a war looks like,” said CODEPINK of the president’s threats of even more military action in the coming days, as he warned that more attacks are expected near the airport in Kabul in the next 36 hours.
This is NOT what ending a war looks like. All these strikes do is further fuel hatred and violence against the US and further risk the lives of Afghan civilians. https://t.co/KRXP3yMsfQ
In addition to the U.S. drone strikes, BBC correspondent Secunder Kermani reported that according to eyewitnesses, many people who were killed in Thursday’s attack were shot by U.S. troops.
Our report from last night on the awful ISIS attack outside Kabul airport as families still search Kabul's morgues for their loved ones..
Many we spoke to, including eyewitnesses, said significant numbers of those killed were shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast pic.twitter.com/ac5nUVeJ4x
In the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal influential promoters of western militarism have been absolutely fuming about the popular idea of ending the forever wars, and their tantrums are not even trying to disguise it as something else. They’re literally using that phrase, “ending the forever wars”, and then saying it’s a bad thing.
I mean, what a bizarre hill to die on. War is the very worst thing in the world, and forever is the very worst amount of time they could go on for, yet they’re openly condemning the “doctrine of ending the forever wars”. How warped does your sense of reality have to be to even think this is a view anyone who isn’t paid by defense contractors could possibly be sympathetic to?
Yet they are indeed trying. Citing the chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal as though every single day of the twenty-year occupation has not been far worse, career-long warmongers are trying to spin “ending the forever wars” as a disdainful slogan that everyone should reject.
Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain who led the UK into Afghanistan, criticized Biden's withdrawal, calling it a hasty move made “in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars.’” https://t.co/jJbWliMJc9
As we discussed previously, The Hague fugitive Tony Blair recently made headlines with a lengthy statement bloviating about the concept of ending forever wars with the revulsion you’d normally reserve for people advocating the elimination of age of consent laws or legalizing recreational panda punching.
“We didn’t need to do it. We chose to do it,” Blair wrote of the withdrawal. “We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’, as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even ten years ago, and in circumstances in which troop numbers had declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months.”
As Blair well knows, the only reason no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months was because the Trump administration had cut a deal with the Taliban in February 2020 on condition of withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pretending the lack of deaths among occupying forces was due to the occupation being easy and that it was in any way sustainable minus a credible promise of withdrawal is disgusting. And not that Blair cares but it’s not like the occupation hasn’t been slaughtering mountains of civilians during those eighteen months.
Paul Wolfowitz, chief advocate of the Iraq War, being given major op-ed space to argue the US should've never withdrawn from Afghanistan — while also lecturing Biden on "credibility" — proves that in US media, there's no official wrongdoing that you can't be rehabilitated from pic.twitter.com/0TZ5dWRCPv
Then there’s Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz, who’s been on a media tour throughout the withdrawal because obviously everyone wants to hear the opinions of Bush administration war criminals about whether it’s okay to end the Bush administration’s criminal wars. His latest contribution is a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The ‘Forever War’ Hasn’t Ended” in which he argues the concept of ending forever wars is both stupid and fallacious.
“President Biden, like his two immediate predecessors, seems to think you can end ‘forever wars’ simply by leaving them,” Wolfowitz writes. “But Thursday’s unprovoked attack, on people who were fleeing and those who were helping them, demonstrates the truth of the soldier’s adage that ‘the enemy always gets a vote.’”
“Choosing to avoid ‘forever war’ by abandoning our Afghan allies was both costly and dishonorable,” says Wolfowitz. “Exactly as Churchill said to Neville Chamberlain after the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich: ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.’”
God what a wanker.
In many respects, #Afghanistan represents the 1st real implementation of the "ending forever wars" doctrine.
The results so far?
– Crumbling of a democratic government; – #Taliban rule; – #AlQaeda ecstatic; – Emergency mass evacuation; – Unprecedented transatlantic divisions. pic.twitter.com/NdAJPgafhP
Then there’s UAE-funded war propagandist Charles Lister hilariously arguing that the withdrawal shows a failure of the “ending forever wars doctrine” on the basis that it caused the “crumbling of a democratic government” and made “Al Qaeda ecstatic”. Hilarious because only by the most determined mental gymnastics was the corrupt US puppet regime in Afghanistan “democratic”, and because Lister has been an outspoken advocate of Al Qaeda in Syria.
There’s also the insufferably hawkish Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who has received campaign donations from Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, appearing on MSNBC and writing a Foreign Policy op-ed explicitly in opposition to the notion of ending endless wars.
“On both sides of the political spectrum, we’ve heard the ‘endless wars’ rallying cry used to argue against America’s presence in the Middle East,” Kinzinger writes for Foreign Policy. “We’ve heard the many fatigued Americans who complain about ‘forever wars.’ Some are upset by the money spent, and others want our troops home, or both. Those who have lamented for years that our mission in Afghanistan was a disaster from the start are stepping up in droves to say they were right and that we should have left years ago—or never engaged at all. I respectfully and vehemently disagree with all of it.”
Kinzinger told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that “the kind of Rand Paul ‘endless war’ crowd that have been stoking this fire of endless war and man we’re all tired” is like “when your grandma tells you how tired you are and you eventually feel tired.” He then advocated for re-invading Afghanistan to take back the abandoned Bagram airfield.
In a recent National Review article titled “The ‘Forever War’ Fallacy“, MSNBC contributor Noah Rothman rages against the notion of ending perpetual military slaughter.
“In Afghanistan, the demagogues who wanted to see an end to America’s ‘forever wars,’ regardless of the consequences, got their wish. It has been a disaster arguably without parallel,” writes Rothman, who has apparently never heard of the disaster that was the entire Afghanistan occupation.
“The U.S. maintains deployments in and around the Middle East that fluctuate between 45,000 and 65,000 troops. Would advocates of retrenchment sacrifice that mission — and the Middle Eastern governments that rely on it to prevent non-state actors and Iranian proxies from destabilizing those regimes?” Rothman asks. “What about Africa, where between 6,000 and 7,000 American troops are advising local forces fighting Islamist militant groups?”
The alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not “endless occupation” but open-ended presence. Occupation is imposed, presence invited. Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, & South Korea. And yes, withdrawal was the problem. https://t.co/FceI02wWNF
Perhaps the funniest case was Richard Haass, president of the wildly influential war propaganda firm Council on Foreign Relations, arguing on Twitter for a rebranding of “endless occupation” to “open-ended presence”.
“The alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not ‘endless occupation’ but open-ended presence,” Haass said. “Occupation is imposed, presence invited. Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, and South Korea. And yes, withdrawal was the problem.”
I mean, where to even start with that one? The hilarious notion that simply rebranding an endless occupation which has killed hundreds of thousands of people with a different label makes it better? The idea that the consent of a puppet government installed by regime change invasion means the military presence was “invited”? The claim that an occupation of nonstop bombing and killing is comparable to US military presence in Japan, Germany and South Korea? The claim that there’s any legitimate reason for the US military to be in Japan, Germany and South Korea either? The suggestion that everyone in Japan, Germany and South Korea wants the US military there?
Moron.
If you think the Afghanistan withdrawal is going badly wait til you hear about literally every single day before the Afghanistan withdrawal for 20 years.
The fact that these people are thought leaders of policy-shaping influence and not fringe pariahs of society shows that our world is being steered by idiots and sociopaths. They’re standing there right in front of us and wagging their fingers at us for opposing something as straightforwardly and self-evidently bad as endless war. ENDLESS WAR.
They should be mocked and laughed at for this. We will know our world is becoming sane when such creatures are regarded with scorn and ridicule instead of being taken seriously by the largest platforms in our society. Never stop making fun of these freaks.
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Western nations behaved “shamefully” by deporting people to Afghanistan before leaving the nation to the Taliban, an advocate for Afghan refugees has said.
Abdul Ghafoor is the director of the Afghanistan Migrants Advice and Support Organisation (Amaso). He said some nations were trying to deport Afghans back to the nation even until the day Kabul fell. He told the PA news agency:
I have been advocating against the deportation to Afghanistan for the past six years… my fear was what we are witnessing today…
It’s shameful to see that some of the countries were insisting (on deportations) until the last day – until Kabul had collapsed.
Millions suffering
The UK government has only promised to take up to 20,000 Afghan refugees, with 5,000 in the first year, following the Taliban takeover. Ghafoor commented that:
I don’t think (5,000) is enough… there are millions of people suffering…
I don’t sleep at night, just worried by my fellow Afghans back in Afghanistan.
Ghafoor was working in his office in Kabul when the capital fell on 15 August.
He quickly had to burn documents to protect thousands of Taliban targets, including his staff and the displaced he helps, and go into hiding.
Ghafoor feared that his work made him a target for the Taliban. He managed to flee on an evacuation flight to Germany with his family several days later.
“They were the most horrible experiences of my life,” Ghafoor said.
Displaced and unwanted
Ghafoor named Belgium and Austria among countries that were insisting on deportations until the Taliban had taken Kabul. But he added that the UK has been “very tough” on Afghan refugees.
Ghafoor said:
The UK has been very tough towards refugees, especially Afghan refugees…
Those who were deported and those I had a chance to meet… among them were people who actually had been granted asylum until they were 18.
As soon as they were 18, everything was ripped again from them – everything was taken and they were in limbo.
Abdul Ghafoor fled Afghanistan in the week after Kabul fell (Abdul Ghafoor)
Ghafoor said those deported to Afghanistan are at a higher risk of being targeted by the Taliban:
Afghan returnees, among them you have Christian converts, atheists who have changed their religion…
To the Taliban… they are infidels.
Placing border control above human lives
Ghafoor said most European countries “including the UK” aren’t offering enough legal routes for refugees to travel to their countries. He added:
If you want to stop illegal migration let’s do it – but what’s your alternative? What legal or safer ways do you have for refugees?
Home Office statistics released this week show the UK has deported a total of 6,033 Afghan nationals since 2010. And 10 enforced returns have happened in the last 12 months.
Separate Home Office figures show 3,476 Afghan nationals have been refused entry at UK ports since 2010. These include 167 in the year to March 2021.
Warfare has been a plague haunting the human species ever since our evolution to become Homo Sapiens, finally, around 300,000 years ago in Africa. Etymologically, homo means human and sapiens means wise or knowledgeable. One can see that in this 18th century anthropocentric characterization of our species, the notion of wisdom was highly overrated. What made our common Homo sapiens ancestors any wiser than the Neanderthals that they would eventually invade and annihilate? History is narrated by victors, therefore we were told that Homo sapiens were highly superior to the so-called brutal Neanderthals. It could be true in territorial ambitions, and some technological aspects, but it remains questionable in other area of social activity.
Ultimately, a taste for adventure and conquest is what drove Homo sapiens to expand their territories on Earth. It would be utterly naive to think that this progressive form of colonization was accomplished through peaceful means. No, unfortunately for our species, a propensity for aggression, for domination through warfare was always present in Homo sapiens DNA.
Wars of necessity or of choice: all wars are for profit
Warfare in the 20th century was rather simple compared to today’s predicaments. Either during World War I or World War II, nations had traditional alliances which were usually respected and recognized by treaties. Usually formal declarations of wars were issued before a military action — with the exception of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl-Harbor. The two wars were sold by leaders to their respective populations as wars of necessity. In both cases, they were still wars fought by conscripts, as professional soldiers, a euphemism for mercenaries, are usually not eager to become cannon fodder.
While the United States cautiously, one could say cowardly, stood on the sideline during World War I until 1917, the conflict unquestionably triggered the Russian revolution, as poor Russians conscripts refused to fight the tsar’s war. As Marxist ideas were quickly spreading elsewhere in Europe, many French soldiers refused to fight their German brothers for the sake of capitalism. Many conscripts then knew that the so-called war of necessity was a scheme of war for profit. At the Versailles treaty, Germany was forced to pay an enormous amount to France, in gold, as war compensation. In the Middle East, in an even more substantial perennial spoils of war story, the two dominant empires of the time, the United Kingdom and France had grabbed for themselves the bulk of the Ottoman empire through the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.
If you analyze the war of necessity versus war of choice, and correlation of war for profit during World War II, in the case of the United States, first you wonder what took the US so long to enter the war alongside their allies France and England? The answer is often murky, as many major US corporations such as Ford Motor and General Motors, as well as policymakers such as Joe Kennedy (father of JFK), had either vested economic interests in Nazi Germany or were upfront in their support for Adolf Hitler.
Further, once the United States was attacked by Japan and finally committed to the European part of the conflict against Germany, a large part of Detroit’s manufacturing sector was converted to military purposes. In the United States, it is arguably more this massive war effort than FDR’s New Deal which turned the US economy into a juggernaut, in a dramatic recovery from the Great Depression, which the Wall Street crash of 1929 had started. Warfare writes human history using blood and tears for ink, but the merchants of death of the military-industrial complex and their financial market affiliates always profit handsomely.
If slavery or slave labor is the ideal structure for capitalism, any war, under any pretext, is the perfect business venture, as it provides a fast consumption of goods (weapons and ammunition), cheap labor force using the leverage of patriotism — defend the motherland or fatherland — and infinite money to rebuild once capitalism’s wars for profit have turned everything to ruins and ashes. After World War II, the US Marshall Plan was painted as some great altruistic venture, but, in fact, it justified a long-term occupation of Germany and incredibly lucrative contracts, some of them aimed at controlling West Germany’s economy and government.
Rise of conceptual wars: war on terror and war on Covid
If the wars of the 20th century were conventional as they either opposed sovereign nations or were in the context of imperial-colonial setback, like the French war in Indochina, Algeria’s independence war against France, some were specifically defined by the Cold War era, like the Korea war. From World War II at the Yalta conference, two new empires had emerged as dominant: the United States and the USSR. The world had then the predictability of this duality. The collapse of the Soviet Union altered this balance, but it took a bit more than a decade to make a quantum leap.
Almost exactly 20 years ago, an event, the September 11, 2001 attack, radically changed the dynamic, as it marked the start of the conceptual war on terror. Terror is an effect, an emotion. How can one possibly wage war against an emotion? However absurd conceptually, this turning point in history allowed more or less all governments worldwide to embark into surveillance, obsession for security and a crackdown on personal liberties. Using the shock and fear in the population, which followed the collapse of the New York City Twin Towers in the US, a form of police state was almost immediately born using new administrative branches of government like the Department of Homeland Security. We still live in the post 9/11 world, as that coercive apparatus keep dragging on.
Just like in standard, more conventional warfare, capitalism doesn’t create crises like 9/11, but seems always to find ways to benefit from it. In the war-on-terror era, a narrative also popular with Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, the beneficiaries were and still are the global military-industrial complex, private security apparatus more like small private armies, and layers of police forces. How can one go wrong in terms of maximum profit?
In complete haste, and with a massive international support, using the trauma to influence worldwide public opinion, an attack on Afghanistan was launched by NATO’s invincible armada. Were the Taliban governing the country at the time responsible for 9/11? Not so. Their fault was to host the man who was arguably the architect of the attack: enemy-number-one Osama bin-Laden, of course. The fact that most of the pilots who flew the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were Saudi Arabian nationals was not even dismissed, it wasn’t even publicly considered by governments or the corporate controlled mainstream media.
As matter of fact, many families of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack victims are still trying to get a sense of closure on a potential involvement of Saudi Arabia, at the highest level, in the tragedy to this day without much success, as a form of foreign policy Omerta seems to prevail in the US with the Saudis royal family. This was certainly not a war of necessity, it barely qualified as a war of choice, as it was a pure fit of anger against an individual and his relatively small organization, not even against a state.
Twenty years later, back to square one, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan affairs, but NATO, the military coalition of the impulsive and ill informed, are still not candidly making mea culpa, and admitting their gross ineptitude and almost criminal negligence. Colossal failure was always written all over Afghanistan’s bullets ridden walls, mosques and even modest fruit stands! Quagmires were also perfectly predictable in the war on terror sequels in Iraq; Libya (using French/Anglo/UAE proxies); Syria (using proxy good Jihadists), then ISIS (once many of the good Sunni Jihadists somehow decided to turn bad). Described like this the 20-year war on terror’s horrendous fiascos sound like the theater of the absurd! Absurd for the successive policy makers and incompetent or corrupt planners, but tragic for the almost one million dead and their surviving families, the 38 million refugees or internally displaced, and countries like Libya, turned into wrecked failed states. Meanwhile the military-industrial complex, including the private contractors, has become more powerful than ever.
The tragically failed policies of the past 20 years have to be quantified. According to Brown University Watson Institute, and this is a conservative estimate, the human cost of post 9/11 wars is around 800,000 in direct deaths; 38 million people worldwide is the number of war refugees and displaced persons collateral victims of the war on terror; and finally, the US war on terror spending from 2001 to 2020 was $6.4 trillion. All this money extracted from the US taxpayers, and enthusiastically approved in Congress by both Democrats and Republicans, was injected into the private corporations of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon, of course, to a lesser extent, and ultimately as a billionaire-making cash bonanza into Wall Street and all global financial markets. How it works is rather simple: below are two prime examples, among countless other similar schemes, to profit from the war machine.
One quick example of war for mega-profit comes to mind. Before he accepted to be George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney was the CEO of the giant construction, oil and mineral extraction firm Halliburton. Right before he started to campaign, he, of course, resigned from his CEO function and sold his huge Halliburton stock portfolio to avoid conflict of interests. Fast forward to 2003, and guess which firm is getting the lion share of private contracts for the Iraq war? Halliburton, of course. Coincidence? Hard to believe. Such example of vast sums of money being recycled from the taxpayers’ pocket book to the coffers of private companies war profiteers are countless.
The other example is the major weapon systems manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin manufactures fighter jets like F-15, F-16, F-35, and F-21; helicopters like Blackhawks and Cyclone, as well as Drones. On January 19, 2000 the share value for Lockheed Martin was $12.10. By January 17, 2020 Lockheed Martin stock traded at $408.77 a share. The bottom line: who in the US Congress would dare to say no to funding the military-industrial complex via the US Defense Department budget? Basically nobody. It would be deemed unpatriotic and bad for the job market, considering that the military-industrial complex employs a lot of people.
Terror is out, global pandemic is in
One cannot help making an analogy between the war on terror and the new global war for profit, which is the war on Covid. As the war on terror is being exposed as a complete fiasco and receding in history’s rear view mirror, global capitalism needed something else. It magically materialized as a global biological warfare against a virus.What a golden opportunity! Since March 2020 — a bit later in the crisis actually — the beneficiaries of the war on Covid have been, not only pharmaceutical companies, but also digital giants that benefit from remote-location work due to measures like lockdowns, online commerce; and, finally, the global financial markets.
France’s President Macron was, to my knowledge, the very first world leader to use the bellicose semantic of war on Covid. He did it in March 2020. We have seen previously that the war on terror has been immensely profitable for the nexus of global corporate imperialism, but the recent war on Covid could be even more profitable, as its protagonists/profiteers appear to be benevolent, even altruistic. The current push worldwide, and Macron was once again ahead of the game, is either to make vaccination mandatory, or blackmail the population with coercive measures like the Pass Sanitaire in France, to obey and comply.
This is the calculus and assumption that all governments and biotech affiliates are likely making. Let’s say that they manage to make vaccination mandatory. Worldwide, you would have a captive market of around 7.8 billion people. Even if 800 million people globally resist vaccination, we are talking about an extraordinarily profitable market. At around $15 per dose for the best-adopted vaccines on the market, which are from Pfizer and Moderna, multiplied by two, or even better by three, as is now recommended by pharmaceutical companies and some governments, because of the Delta variant, we are talking about some serious cash flow. With booster jabs likely recommended down the line every nine months or so, we are talking about a biotech Eldorado!
As an example of the heavenly jolt of joy vaccines have already injected into the arms of the Masters of the Universe of global finance, Moderna stock on January 2, 2020 traded at $19.57 a share. On August 11, 2021, Moderna stock traded on Wall Street at $440.00 a share. It is rather obvious, besides various stimulus package schemes applied in all countries to boost economies and prevent a massive Covid economic recession, global financial markets, with the big hedge funds pulling the strings, have become addicted to vaccines. It is no wonder that all major Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have already made vaccination mandatory for their employees. It is no wonder either, why stock markets, like the CAC40 in France, have reached record high despite a severe contraction of the real economy.
I previously mentioned the real cost of the 20-year war on terror as being $6.4 trillion for the United States alone. It is not yet possible to quantify the real cost of the so-called global war on Covid. One can suspect it will be very high as well, and its human cost higher in term of diminished personal liberties. The negative side effects of the war on Covid are mainly sociological and psychological, as it has already increased human isolation and fragmented communities. This 18-month old pseudo war on a virus has also withdrawn global resources and focus from the only war of necessity, the one critical for our species survival: namely the war on climate collapse.
War on climate collapse is a war against capitalism
The war on Covid could even last longer than the war on terror. Cynically, the reason for this is that the war on Covid has worked wonders for the benefit of corporations and the super-rich. It has also allowed for governments that are supposed to be neoliberal economically and progressive socially to become paradoxically authoritarian. A prime example, in this instance, is again Emmanuel Macron’s government in France. As long as wars, invented or not, either conventional or conceptual, can be used to extract a profit, they will remain the modus operandi for the billionaire class and their political surrogates. It might sound Utopian, but let’s just imagine for a moment what humanity could do collectively to address the climate crisis existential threat, if we were going to implement a global policy of massive cuts in military spending and security apparatus.
Trillion of dollars could be allocated to the true emergency that will determine our survival or extinction. What could be more critical than this for our children and grandchildren? Climate collapse is on its way. During this entire summer, large areas of Earth were on fire, and others were flooded. Killer storms will keep coming relentlessly at us. Before 2050 many coastlines will be submerged, causing more than 1 billion people worldwide to become the climate collapse refugees. This is not a projection or speculation, it is documented by the scientific community.
Unfortunately, the reason why our Banana Republic styles of governments are not willing to fight this war of necessity, the war on climate change, is because it can only be really fought by getting rid of the capitalist system altogether. Radical approaches are needed, such as scrapping capitalism’s holy precept of permanent economic growth and its correlation of population growth. The remedies to try to mitigate the unfolding climate collapse would be many tough pills to swallow, because it’s about drastic systemic changes. Such as a zero-growth, sometime called negative-growth, economic model, which even Green parties at large do not embrace. The notion of Green New Deal is ludicrous. Green politicians either do not get it or are complete hypocrites if they are not also staunch anti-capitalists.
Another issue almost never addressed by Green politicians anywhere is the one of overpopulation. The rapid growth of the human population is a fundamental factor for capitalism as it provides two critical elements: plenty of cheap labor as well as a continuously growing consumption base. Case in point, in 1850 or at the start of the industrial revolution, the global world population stood at around 1 billion people; currently, or 171 years later and not much time in term of human history, it stands at around 7.8 billion. Some demographic projections forecast that it will reach between 10 to 13 billion by 2100. Needless to say, from a purely physical standpoint, this is entirely unsustainable as the surface of Earth’s landmass has gone unchanged. The problem with overpopulation, as an issue, is that almost everyone in every culture rightly views his or her ability to procreate as a fundamental right. My News Junkie Post partner, Dady Chery, and I, we know that even to bring up overpopulation as an issue is extremely unpopular. However, it has to be done.
Without a massive reduction in carbon emissions, we are on track to pass the fatal mark of a 2-degree Celsius global warming, not by 2050 but by 2035. In other words, a wrench has to be jammed into the gear of the infernal machine created by humans since the mid-19th century’s industrial revolution. Carbon emitting fossil fuels, of any kind, have to stay in the ground. Combustion vehicles should be banned promptly, and massive subsidies should be given to produce extremely affordable and fully electrical cars immediately.
Many in the West point the finger at the big carbon emitters, which are China, India and Brazil. But they are not the only culprits for the nearly criminal inaction of our governing instances. The populations of countries that rely heavily on extraction must put a severe pressure on their politicians or vote them out of office. One thinks, of course, of the Gulf’s usual suspects like Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but other major players are almost as nefarious as far as having an economy built on energy or mineral extraction. A short list of the main countries heavily involved in the fossil fuel extraction business, either for domestic consumption or exports, would be: Russia, The United States, Canada, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, and Iran.
Would the various radical changes – including capping human population growth- which seem to be objectively needed be painful? Certainly. But the alternative option, which is basically to keep the course of this giant high-speed bullet train without a pilot that is global capitalism, amounts to a medium-term collective suicide.
To cover up the humiliating defeat for the United States and its allies in Afghanistan, the Anglo-American media is spinning tales of a great “humanitarian” airlift to save Afghani women from assumed brutality when the Taliban consolidate their power across Afghanistan.
But, at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, last week the Chinese changed the narrative, calling for the US, UK, Australia and other NATO countries to be held accountable for alleged violations of human rights committed during the two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
“Under the banner of democracy and human rights the US and other countries carry out military interventions in other sovereign states and impose their own model on countries with vastly different history, culture and national conditions [which has] brought severe disasters to their people,” China’s ambassador in Geneva Cheng Xu told the council.
“United States, the United Kingdom and Australia must be held accountable for their violations of human rights in Afghanistan, and the resolution of this Special Session should cover this issue,” he added.
Amnesty International and a host of other civil society speakers have also called for the creation of a robust investigative mechanism that would allow for monitoring and reporting on human rights violations and abuses, including grave crimes under international law.
They have also asked for the mechanism to assist in holding those suspected of criminal responsibility to justice in fair trials.
However, they were looking at the future rather than the past.
Adopted by consensus
The UNHRC member states adopted by consensus a resolution which merely requests further reports and an update by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in March 2022.
China was extraordinarily critical of Australia in May this year when the so-called Brereton Report was released by the Australian government into a four-year investigation of possible war crimes in Afghanistan by Australian forces.
The findings revealed that some of Australia’s most elite soldiers in the SAS (Special Air Services) had been involved in unlawful killing, blood lust, a warrior culture and cover-up of their alleged atrocities.
It came as a surprise to an Australian public, which believes that Australian military engagement in Afghanistan was designed to keep the world safe from terrorists.
Today, Australians and the rest of the world are fed by a news narrative that the West saved Afghani women from the brutality of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime, and now they need to be airlifted by Western forces to save them from falling into the hands of the Taliban again.
Rather than airlifting Afghans out of the country, China’s ambassador Xu told UNHRC: “We will continue developing a good neighbourly, friendly and cooperative relationship with Afghanistan and continue our constructive role in its process of peace and reconstruction.”
Reporting this, Yahoo Australia pointed out that Afghanistan was sitting on precious mineral deposits estimated to be worth US$1 trillion and the country also had vast supplies of iron ore, copper and gold. Is believed to be home to one of the world’s largest deposits of lithium.
The report suggested that China was eyeing these resources.
Accountability for the West
However, such suspicions should not come in the way of calling for the West to be accountable for its war crimes in Afghanistan, which have been well documented even by such organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The UNHRC has not taken up these issues so far, fearing US retaliation.
Speaking on Sri Lankan Sirasa TV’s Pathikade programme, Professor Prathiba Mahanamahewa, a former member of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission who went to Afghanistan on a fact-finding mission on the invitation of the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission in 2014, argued that Western nations had been instrumental in creating terrorist groups around the world like the Taliban to destabilise governing systems in countries.
“At the core of the Taliban is the idea of spreading Islamic fundamentalism and they have inspired similar movements in the region; thus, it is a big threat to countries in Asia, especially in South Asia,” argued Professor Mahanamahewa.
“There are parties that pump a lot of funds to the Taliban.”
He said that in 2018, Sri Lanka (with several other countries) fought at the UNHRC to come up with a treaty to stop these financial flows to terrorist groups.
“Until today, nothing has been done,” said Professor Mahanamahewa.
Producer of opium and hashish
He added that Afghanistan was a large producer of opium and hashish, and the West was a big market for it, thus “Talibans would obviously like to have some form of relations with the West”.
In April 2019, the International Criminal Court (ICC) rejected its prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s November 2017 request to open an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity during Afghanistan’s brutal armed conflict.
Such an investigation would have investigated war crimes and brutality of both the Taliban and the US-led forces and activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The panel of judges concluded that since the countries concerned had not taken any action over the perpetrators of possible “war crimes”, ICC could not act because it was a court of last resort.
In March 2011, the Rolling Stones magazine carried a lengthy investigative report on how war crimes by US forces were covered up by the Pentagon.
After extensive interviews with members of a group within the US forces called Bravo Company, they described how they were focused on killings Afghan civilians like going to the forests to hunt animals, and how these killings of innocent villages who were sometimes working in the fields were camouflaged as a terror attack by Taliban.
The soldiers involved were not disciplined or punished and US army aggressively moved to frame the incidents as the work of a “rogue unit”. The Pentagon clamped down on information about these killings, and soldiers in the Bravo Company were barred from speaking to the media.
Documented incidents
While the US occupation continued, many human rights organisations have documented incidents like these and called for independent international investigations, which have met with lukewarm response.
Only a few were punished with light sentences that did not reflect the gravity of the crime.
After losing the elections, in November 2020 President Trump pardoned two US army officials who were accused and jailed for war crimes in Afghanistan. While some Pentagon leaders expressed concern that this action would damage military discipline, Trump tweeted “we train our boys to be killing machines, then persecute them when they kill”.
It is perhaps now time that the US indulged in some soul-searching about their culture of killing, rather than using a narrative of “saving Afghani women” to cover up barbaric killing when the US-led forces were involved in Afghanistan.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of one of India’s top think-tanks, the Centre Policy Research, argued in an Indian Express article that terrorist groups like the Taliban or ISIS were “products of modern imperial politics” that was unsettling local societies, encouraging violence, supported fundamentalism, thus breaking up state structures.
He listed 7 sins of the US Empire that contributed to the debacle in Afghanistan. These included corruption that drives war; self-deception like what happened in Vietnam and now Afghanistan; lack of morality where the empire drives lawlessness; and hypocrisy, a cult of violence and racism.
It is interesting that the Rolling Stones feature reflected the last two points in the way the Bravo Company went about picking up innocent villages for killing. But Mehta argued that “the modality of US withdrawal exuded the fundamental sin of empire. Its reinforcement of race and hierarchy”.
‘Common humanity’
He noted: “Suddenly, the pretext of common humanity, and universal liberation, which was the pretext of empire, turned into the worst kind of cultural essentialism. It is their culture, these medieval tribalists who are incapable of liberty”.
Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, writing on the Al Jazeera website asked: “What can the Taliban do to Afghanistan that it and the US, and their European allies have already not done to it?”
He described the Doha deal between the US and the Taliban as a deal to hand Afghanistan back to the Taliban.
“As for Afghan women and girls, they are far better off fighting the fanaticism and stupidity of the Taliban on their own and not under the shadow of US military barracks,” argued Professor Dabashi.
“Iranian, Pakistani, Turkish and Arab women have been fighting similar, if not identical, patriarchal thuggery right in their neighbourhood, so will Afghan women.”
Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.
Could an atrocity have been arranged by some of Baradar’s men at the request of the CIA?
Three days before the bloody carnage at Kabul airport, CIA director William Burns held a secret meeting with a top Taliban commander in the Afghan capital. That is only one of several suspicious events this week in the countdown to the dramatic U.S. evacuation.
At least 13 U.S. troops guarding an entrance to Kabul airport were killed in an apparent suicide bomb attack. Dozens of Afghans waiting in line for evacuation by military cargo planes were also killed. A second blast hit a nearby hotel used by British officials to process immigration documents.
It was not the main ranks of the Taliban who carried out the atrocities. The militant group which swept into power on August 15 after taking over Kabul has ring-fenced the capital with checkpoints. The explosions occurred in airport districts under the control of the U.S. and British military.
A little-known terror group, Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), claimed responsibility for the bombings. IS-K was barely reported before until this week when the U.S. and British intelligence services issued high-profile warnings of imminent terror attacks by this group at Kabul airport. Those warnings came only hours before the actual attacks. President Joe Biden even mentioned this new terror organization earlier this week and pointedly claimed they were “sworn enemies” of the Taliban.
How is an obscure terror outfit supposed to infiltrate a highly secure area – past “sworn enemy” Taliban checkpoints – and then breach U.S. and British military cordons?
How is it that U.S. and British intelligence had such precise information on imminent threats when these same intelligence agencies were caught completely flat-footed by the historic takeover of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15? When the Taliban swept into the capital it marked the collapse of a regime that the Americans and British had propped for nearly 20 years during their military occupation of Afghanistan. Could their intelligence agencies miss foreseeing such a momentous event and yet less than two weeks later we are expected to believe these same agencies were able to pinpoint an imminent atrocity requiring complex planning?
What is the political fallout from the airport bombings? President Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are adamant that the evacuation from Kabul will be completed by the deadline on August 31. Biden said the atrocity underscores the urgency to get out of Afghanistan, although he threw in the token vow that “we will hunt down” the perpetrators.
To be sure, the president is coming under intense political fire for capitulating against the Taliban and terrorists and for betraying Afghan allies. Some Republicans are demanding his resignation due to his overseeing a disaster and national disgrace. It is estimated that up to 250,000 Afghans who worked with the U.S. military occupation will be left behind and in danger of reprisal attacks.
There seems a negligible chance that the deaths of 13 U.S. troops – the largest single-day killing of Americans in Afghanistan since a Chinook helicopter was shot down in August 2011 with 38 onboard – will provoke an extension of the Pentagon’s mission in the country. Even after the bombings this week, the Pentagon advised Biden to stick to the August 31 deadline. The Taliban have also stated that all U.S. and NATO troops must be out of the country by that date.
Polls were showing that most Americans agreed with Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan – the longest war by the U.S. was seen as futile and unwinnable. The sickening bomb attacks this week will only underscore the public sense of war-weariness. Hawkish calls for returning large-scale forces to Afghanistan have little political resonance.
This brings us back to the secret meeting earlier this week between the CIA’s William Burns and Taliban commander Abdul Ghani Baradar. The Washington Postreported that Biden sent Burns to meet with Baradar in Kabul. It was the most senior contact between the Biden administration and the Taliban since the latter’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15. The details of the discussion were not disclosed and some reports indicated other Taliban figures were not aware of the meeting.
Baradar is one of the founding members of the Taliban. He was captured by Pakistan intelligence and the CIA in 2010. But at the request of the United States, Baradar was released from prison in 2018. Thereafter he led the Taliban in negotiations with the U.S. on finding an end to the conflict. Those talks culminated in a deal in February 2020 with the Trump administration agreeing to troop withdrawal this year. Biden has stuck to the pullout plan.
From his career path, there is good reason to believe that Baradar is the CIA’s man inside the Taliban. Let’s say at least that he has the agency’s ear.
Why else would CIA chief Burns meet Baradar at such a crucial time in the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan? To get Taliban assurances of security measures safeguarding American troops as they exit? That obviously didn’t happen.
What else, then? Could an atrocity have been arranged by some of Baradar’s men at the request of the CIA? The objective being to shift focus from a shambolic, shameful retreat to one of necessity due to terror threats. It seems uncanny that U.S. and British intelligence services were warning of an event only hours before it happened in a way that was precisely predicted. The other consequence of benefit is that the droves of desperate Afghans queueing near Kabul airport are dispersed out of fear of more bloodshed. The beneficial optic is that U.S. and British military planes will take off on August 31 without the harrowing, pitiful scenes of Afghans running down the runway after them. Hence, the empire wraps up its bloody criminal war, with a little less shame than otherwise.
Publicly, the Taliban have undertaken to protect journalists and respect press freedom but the reality in Afghanistan is completely different, says Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
The new authorities are already imposing very harsh constraints on the news media even if they are not yet official, reports RSF on its website.
The list of new obligations for journalists is getting longer by the day. Less than a week after their spokesman pledged to respect freedom of the press “because media reporting will be useful to society,” the Taliban are subjecting journalists to harassment, threats and sometimes violence.
“Officially, the new Afghan authorities have not issued any regulations, but the media and reporters are being treated in an arbitrary manner,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.
“Are the Taliban already dropping their masks? We ask them to guarantee conditions for journalism worthy of the name.”
Privately-owned Afghan TV channels that are still broadcasting in the capital are now being subjected to threats on a daily basis.
Reporters branded ‘takfiri’
A producer* working for one privately-owned national channel said: “In the past week, the Taliban have beaten five of our channel’s reporters and camera operators and have called them ‘takfiri’ [tantamount to calling them ‘unbelievers’, in this context].
“They control everything we broadcast. In the field, the Taliban commanders systematically take the numbers of our reporters and tell them: ‘When you prepare this story, you will say this and say that.’
“If they say something else, they are threatened.”
Many broadcasters have been forced to suspend part of their programming because Kabul’s new masters have ordered them to respect the Sharia — Islamic law.
“Series and broadcasts about society have been stopped and instead we are just broadcasting short news bulletins and documentaries from the archives,” said a commercial TV channel representative, who has started to let his beard grow as a precaution and now wears traditional dress.
The owner of a privately-owned radio station north of Kabul confirmed that the Taliban are progressively and quickly extending their control over news coverage.
‘They began “guiding” us’
“A week ago, they told us: ‘You can work freely as long as you respect Islamic rules’ [no music and no women], but then they began ‘guiding’ us about the news that we could or could not broadcast and what they regard as ‘fair’ reporting,” said the owner, who ended up closing his radio station and going into hiding.
Two journalists working for the privately-owned TV channel Shamshad were prevented by a Taliban guard from doing a report outside the French embassy because they lacked a permit signed by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
But when they asked the guard where they should go or who they should ask for such a permit, he said, “I don’t know.”
In the past few days, the Taliban have ordered the most influential Afghan broadcast media to broadcast Taliban propaganda video and audio clips.
When media outlets object, “the Taliban say it is just publicity and they are ready to pay for it to be broadcast, and then they insist, referring to our national or Islamic duty,” a journalist said.
Incidents are meanwhile being reported in the field, and at least 10 journalists have been subjected to violence or threats while working in the streets of Kabul and Jalalabad in the past week.
The Taliban spokesman announced on Twitter on August 21 that a tripartite committee would be created to “reassure the media”. Consisting of representatives of the Cultural Commission and journalists’ associations, and a senior Kabul police officer, the committee’s official purpose will be to “address the problems of the media in Kabul.”
What will its real purpose be?
100 private media outlets suspend operations
The pressure is even greater in the provinces, far from the capital. Around 100 privately-owned local media outlets have suspended operations since the Taliban takeover.
All privately-owned Tolonews TV’s local bureaus have closed.
In Mazar-i-Sharif, the fourth largest city, journalists have been forced to stop working and the situation is very tense.
One national radio station’s terrified correspondent said: “Here in the south, I have to work all the time under threat from the Taliban, who comment on everything I do. ‘Why did you do that story? And why didn’t you ask us for our opinion?’ they say. They want comment on all the stories.”
The head of a radio station in Herat province that had many listeners before the Taliban takeover said the same.
He also reported that, at meeting with media representatives on August 17, the province’s new governor told them he was not their enemy and that they would define the new way of working together.
While all the journalists remained silent, the governor then quoted a phrase from the Sharia that that sums up Islam’s basic practices. He said: “The Sharia defines everything: ‘Command what is good, forbid what is evil.’ You just have to apply it.”
The radio station director added: “After that, most of my colleagues left the city and those of us who stayed must constantly prove that what we broadcast commands what is good and forbids what is evil.”
Foreign correspondents work ‘normally‘
Foreign correspondents still in Kabul have not yet been subjected to these dictates and are managing to work in an almost normal manner. But for how much longer?
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s Youth and Information Department issued this message to foreign journalists on August 21: “Before going into the field and recording interviews with IEA fighters and the local population, they should coordinate with the IEA or otherwise face arrest.”
“There are no clear rules at the moment and we have no idea what will happen in the future,” said a Swiss freelancer who has stayed in Kabul.
Another foreign reporter said: “The honeymoon is not yet over. We are benefitting from the fact that the Taliban are still seeking some legitimacy, and the arrival of the big international TV stations in the past few days is protecting us.
“The real problems will start when we are on our own again.”
*The anonymity of all Afghan and foreign journalists quoted in this RSF news release has been preserved at their request and for security reasons, given the climate of fear currently reigning in Afghanistan. Many of the journalists contacted by RSF said they did not want to be quoted at all, because they have no way of leaving Afghanistan.
Only the strong escaped to safety, as evidence builds that thousands of Afghans entitled to come to Britain still remain in Kabul
When the email arrived last Tuesday, Faaiz Ghulam and his young family were euphoric. Approved for evacuation, they were instructed to head straight to the west gate of Kabul’s Baron Hotel. There, British officials would process their case. Next step, the UK.
Yet Ghulam, his wife and their two children – an 18-month-old daughter and three-year-old son – are today in hiding in Kabul, terrified for their lives. Their first attempt to reach the hotel ended at a Taliban checkpoint. A second was abandoned over safety concerns as Ghulam and his wife carried their children through febrile crowds outside the airport.
The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are instigating their media (which dominates Arab discourse) to portray as horrors the U.S. defeat and resumption of Taliban rule. Ironically, when the Taliban first came to power in 1996 they obtained recognition from just three regimes in the world: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Max Blumenthal And Ben Norton Of The Moderate Rebels Podcast Discuss The US Military Pullout From Afghanistan With Journalist Pepe Escobar, Who Has Extensive Experience Reporting In The Country And Was Arrested By The Taliban Twice.
Witnessing young and middle-aged Afghans running toward a fleeing United States Air Force plane conjures up the notion that supposedly the Afghans don’t want to bid farewell to their U.S. “friend.” The perception this gives to many Americans watching this on television is one of pity and derision, a narrative repeated by policymakers and media personalities alike: We spent billions and lost thousands of servicepeople for a country that just “can’t get it together.” For Afghans, this should be an awakening from the notion that their “friend” the United States — or the so-called “international community” — who came to rescue the country from the Taliban, build the country, and bring democracy, is leaving all too hastily and leaving Pakistan to export the Taliban back into the country.
Both perceptions could not be farther away from the actual truth. This can be easily debunked in three obvious ways. Taking into account the U.S.’s specific military, economic and political actions in Afghanistan, we must recognize that the invasion and occupation were never intended as a route to democracy or progress.
Military Deception: Systemic Underfunding and Harm
Furthermore, according to two very revealing books, Douglas Wissing’s 2012 Funding the Enemy: How the US Taxpayers Bankroll The Taliban and Anand Gopal’s 2014 No Good Men Among the Living: America, The Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, after the 2001 U.S. invasion, most Taliban rank and file members were ready to assimilate back into Afghan society. Yet the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) continued to harass, imprison, and kill Taliban leaders and soldiers to the point of forcing them to take up arms again to defend themselves. By 2005, according to Gopal and Wissing, the U.S. had effectively revived the Taliban.
Added to this was U.S.’s brutal counterinsurgency policies of bombing villages and its night raids in rural areas with nonexistent infrastructure, which further alienated a rural Afghan population already experiencing high unemployment and underdevelopment due to decades of war.
Economic Deception: U.S./NATO Economic Investments Neglected the Most Important Sectors of “Nation-Building”
How is it that 40 of the world’s most developed countries involved in the U.S./NATO operation supposedly spent more in Afghanistan than they did in implementing the Marshall Plan in Western Europe, and yet, somehow still systematically disregarded where that investment needed to go? If sincerely invested, this money would have gone toward building the central state’s administrative capacity for social services and law and order as well as the agricultural sector, since the vast majority of Afghanistan’s population has lived in rural areas for the past 20 years, which is also incidentally the region from which the Taliban got most of their recruits. The World Bank estimates that 74 percent of Afghans live in rural areas, but that number is almost certainly an undercount due to the way in which its figures categorize rural residents who have only temporarily moved to cities.
Instead, the agricultural sector was willfully neglected, which contributed to the high national unemployment rate of at least 40 percent in a country where about 70 percent of the population is under 25 years old. This is rather ironic when the U.S. and the European Union (EU) subsidize their own agricultural sectors, which make up not more than 5 percent of their national labor forces respectively — about $49 billion and $101 billion just in 2019. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, a country with a total GDP of about $20 billion that they occupied for 20 years, they could not subsidize Afghan farmers enough in order to make the country food self-sufficient while creating jobs in the rural areas.
The policies of the U.S. and NATO, because of its lukewarm commitment to “nation-building,” systematically undermined building Afghanistan’s central state capacity (as it also did in Iraq during de-Baathification, destroying its central state capacity), by avoiding giving the majority of the reconstruction aid to the relevant government ministries with the excuse that there wasn’t sufficient capacity in the Afghan government to absorb the aid or that there was corruption.
It is not surprising then that after the U.S. spent billions supporting the Mujahadeen during the 1980s to destroy Afghanistan’s central state, the ensuing civil war among the Mujahadeen and the Taliban from 1992-2001 reduced the standard of living in Afghanistan (as measured by poverty, life expectancy, unemployment, clean water, electricity, etc.) to one of the lowest in the world by 2001. Yet after 20 years of occupation, its poverty rate is about 55 percent, which is no lower than it was in 2001.
However, for those who have followed the U.S.’s foreign development aid record for the past 70 years, Afghanistan’s (or Haiti’s or Iraq’s) case is not a surprise at all. The U.S. foreign aid program is notorious for its poor quality and the stingy quantity it provides to the Global South. It is poor quality because most of the supposed aid money it gives a country usually does not help the receiving country build self-sufficiency in its local agricultural, manufacturing or infrastructural capacity. Instead, most of the aid is “tied aid,” where the receiving country has to spend the majority of the aid money buying from U.S. firms, even though there are less expensive options. Despite the perception of generosity the U.S. has created, its aid amount is one of the lowest among the world’s high-GDP countries: The U.S. gives less than 0.20 percent of its national income to development aid. It does not even give 0.70 percent of its national income, which it has agreed to since the 1970s.
Political Deception: The U.S. Disregarded Afghanistan’s Political Tradition of Democracy
From the very beginning, the U.S./NATO alliance ignored Afghanistan’s longstanding tradition of democracy. The political tradition of the “Loya Jirga” (Grand Assembly) is rooted for at least several centuries in the Afghan tradition of “Jirga” where a council of tribal elders or village elders get together in a gathering similar to a town hall meeting and deliberate about a land dispute or other matters that are creating tensions and conflict between villages or tribes.
In the case of the Loya Jirga, this takes place at the national level where community and religious elders across the country have an assembly to discuss and decide on important matters of the nation. In the Loya Jirga at the Bonn conference in 2001, the Afghan delegates chose Professor Abdul Sattar Sirat — who was a respected Afghan from its Uzbek community, a minister of justice in the Afghan government in the 1970s and a representative of the former Afghan king — as the proposed leader of the interim administration.
However, the U.S. imposed Hamid Karzai by methods of duplicity and intimidation against the delegates’ choice. Karzai was a former Pashtun mujahideen and Taliban representative who had little experience and administrative skill, let alone expertise in rebuilding the Afghan state after 20 years of war and no following or popularity inside Afghanistan. He was seemingly selected because he would be dependent on U.S./NATO support and therefore, submissive to U.S. directives.
Contrary to the dominant orientalist narrative about Afghanistan being a tribal society without a history of a centralized state, Afghanistan had, from the 1880s to about 1992, a modern state with a qualified and professional civil administration that could govern and develop the country professionally so that it would not remain a weak and illegitimate government.
Unfortunately, instead of appointing government officials based on merit and qualifications, the U.S. and NATO deliberately chose a cadre of neoliberal, Ivy League technocrats and warlords with their attendant foreign advisers leading the transition government that ultimately became an infestation of corruption run by NGOs and foreign consultants, with little to no state capacity being built.
The last couple of months of negotiations with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, have further revealed that building a legitimate and professionally staffed Afghan central state with a productive economy for its tax base was never the true intention for Afghanistan, the Middle East or the Central Asian region.
The U.S./NATO’s rhetorical game of nation-building and democracy-building, all while funding the very forces they were officially fighting in the “war on terror,” is one of the greatest deceptions of the last 20 years. The reality is that Afghanistan has become one more bucket-list country in the Project for New American Century (PNAC), and once again, its women, children, elderly and young will pay the biggest price. Hopefully the world will awaken from the belief that the U.S. and NATO — with their shameful colonial legacy and their present neocolonial relations in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, South-East Asia, and Africa — can actually bring peace, prosperity and progress to the Global South.
Following misogynistic Donald Trump’s 2020 sell-out deal with the equally misogynistic Taliban, the big powers have helped restore fundamentalist rule in Afghanistan. That deal included a guarantee by the Taliban to ensure that no group or individual violates the security of the US or its allies within Afghanistan. However, the bombing at Kabul airport by IS-Khorasan (IS-K), which tragically saw at least 169 Afghans killed and many more wounded, put an end to that provision. It was the latest humiliation for the retreating US and its allies.
But Afghan women revolutionaries have come out fighting. And they’re calling for international solidarity and resistance against the Taliban and IS-K. And their Kurdish sisters, with their vast experience of combattingDaesh (ISIS/ISIL) and its Turkish backers, have issued a similar call.
Defiance
In a statement issued on 20 August, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) – first founded in 1977 – declared that:
Women will not be shackled any more! Just the next morning after the Taliban entered the capital, a group of our young brave women painted graffiti on the walls of Kabul with the slogan: Down with Taliban! Our women are now politically conscious and no longer want to live under the Burqa, something they easily did 20 years ago. We will continue our struggles while finding smart ways to stay safe.
Two days earlier the YPJ (Kurdish Women’s Protection Units) General Command also issued a statement, saying:
Just as we as YPJ have resisted IS and the Turkish occupiers and their gangs with the organized force of women, strengthened and increased our army, Afghan women too can become a force for freedom with their strength and organization.
Kurdish women call for solidarity
On 16 August Komalên Jinên Kurdistan (KJK) – a confederation of women’s organisations – issued a statement of solidarity with the women of Afghanistan. Referring to Turkey’s war on the Kurds, the KJK commented on how the US and its allies simply cannot be trusted:
Those who handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban today and those who occupied Afrin, Serêkaniyê, Girê Spî to the Turkish Republic yesterday are the same powers. Those who gave the green light to the Turkish invasion of Rojava and North East Syria yesterday, repeat the same scenario in Afghanistan today.
This was proven yet again when US forces shot civilians dead following the Kabul airport bomb blast.
KJK’s statement also referred to the Turkish invasion of the largely Kurdish-populated Afrin:
Just as in Afrin, where the YPJ, which inspires women from all over the world, was founded, and where today women are subjugated and murdered as a result of the policies of the global hegemonic powers, also the women in Afghanistan face the same threat now.
It concluded:
We call upon all women, especially upon the women in the Middle East, to stand in solidarity with our sisters in Afghanistan, to raise their voices, and to defend their lives, achievements and dreams.
The continuation of US attacks and the increase in the number of innocent civilian victims not only gives an excuse to the Taliban, but also will cause the empowerment of the fundamentalist forces in the region and even in the world.
Tragically, twenty years on, that prediction has proven correct.
Moreover, in March this year, RAWA made it clear what exactly would happen as a consequence of the 2020 Trump-Taliban deal. It declared:
Today, it is up to our people, especially our women, to stand against the treason of the US through a nationwide uprising to fight Pakistani mercenaries, both Taliban and ISIS.
RAWA also referred to how their Kurdish sisters in Kobane (Rojava) “rubbed the snouts of ISIS to the ground”. Referring to the financing and arming of the Taliban from Pakistan, RAWA added:
If we rise without fear, with determination and resilience, we can drive the ISI-created Taliban to their Pakistani godfathers’ bosom.
RAWA further declared that it is women who must now “lead the resistance against the Taliban and co”.
Armed resistance
Earlier in August, one commentator tweeted how Afghanistan needs armed resistance via the equivalent of the YPG (Kurdish People’s Protection Units) and YPJ and the largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces:
The YPJ are feminists who practise democratic confederalism. This is a form of direct democracy based on the ideas of US anarchist Murray Bookchin. According to Kongreya Star, democratic confederalism is:
a system based on a network of small, local communes and assemblies in which people come together to self-organise their neighbourhoods and towns and to decide on their collective needs and concerns. This system is not based on the paradigm of the nation-state with its centralised, state organised democracy, but is rather a bottom-up, direct form of democracy.
It was the YPG/YPJ and their allies who defeated Daesh in its de facto Syrian capital of Raqqa. But Joe Biden, then US vice-president, warned Kurdish militias to back off from their advances. Biden said they “should not spread west of the Euphrates… if they do they will never receive US support again”.
Biden’s threat was all about backing NATO member Turkey, which seized Kurdish-populated territory in the north of Syria. Turkey is now bombing hospitals in Rojava and the mainly Yazidi-populated Sinjar province. As for Turkey’s authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he claims the Taliban’s recent statements are “moderate”.
Kurdish women-RAWA links
Meanwhile, the link between Kurdish women and Afghan women’s struggles for freedom was further emphasised:
When women rise up no force can withstand the storm. Solidarity with the struggles of women in #Afghanistan and may their struggles prove fruitful against all forms of fascist, patriarchal and conservative elements. #AfghanistanCrisispic.twitter.com/l1W4rjLXwt
In a September 2019 interview, activist Samia Walid also referred to the link between the Kurdish struggle against Daesh and that of Afghan women:
The struggle and sacrifices of the lionesses of Kurdistan have been an inspiration and source of strength for us. Their struggle against ISIS and other medieval-aged criminals have given us huge lessons.
Walid added:
RAWA believes international solidarity with independence-seeking, freedom-fighting, democratic and progressive organizations and parties as a vital part of our internal struggle. Our struggle converges with the Kurdish people’s struggle as most of our enemies are similar in nature.
Taliban reality
Walid also explained how RAWA’s political activities include:
publishing our magazines and articles, and mobilizing women to get this consciousness and join our struggle. We collect and document the killings, raping, pillage, extortion, and other crimes of these warlords in remote parts of Afghanistan. Our social activities are providing education to women (not just literacy classes but social and political awareness as to their rights and how to achieve them), emergency aid, making orphanages, and health-related activities.
More recently, RAWA published 29 prohibitions that the Taliban could impose upon women in Afghanistan. These range from prohibition of female work outside the home to prohibition of women from studying at school or university or other educational institutions.
Moreover, the Taliban has organised an Orwellian ‘Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice’, which is:
responsible for controlling the little details of people’s daily lives like the length of the beard, the dress code and having a Mahram (male companion, only father, brother or husband) for a woman.
Rise up!
RAWA is now calling for a “democratic front” to rise up and resist the Taliban:
Today, as we call for the establishment of a democratic front against the Taliban, we call upon all democratic, secular, anti-fundamentalist and anti-occupation forces, all our tormented women, girls and men, to say that nothing will come out of mourning. Let us rise and resist against the Taliban and their partners, in any way and at any level, and give them a taste of defeat and sorrow.
The US and its allies have abandoned Afghan civilians to the mercy of the Taliban. Consequently, resistance within the country will, of necessity, be strictly underground.
And the women revolutionaries of Afghanistan will need all the support they can get.
A new BBC report shows eyewitnesses at the scene of the deadly Kabul airport explosion on Thursday saying that a significant number of the 170 Afghans killed in the attack actually died from gunfire by the US-led alliance in the chaos following the blast.
“Many we spoke to, including eyewitnesses, said significant numbers of those killed were shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast,” the BBC’s Secunder Kermani said on Twitter.
The correspondent talks to the brother a London taxi driver who was in Kabul to fetch his family:
A: “Somehow I saw American soldiers, Turkish soldiers and the fire was coming from the bridges, from the towers.” Q: “From the soldiers?” A: “Yeah, from the soldiers.”
(Side note: Some of the towers around the airport were reportedly manned by members of the CIA’s Afghan death squads.)
Another witness:
Narrator: “Noor Mohamed had had been deployed alongside American forces.”
A man holding up an identity card of a friend talks about his death in English.
A: “The guy has served U.S. army for years. And the reason he lost his life – he wasn’t killed by Taliban, he wasn’t killed by ISIS, he was (unintelligible).” Q: “How can you be sure?” A: “Because of the bullet. The bullet went inside of his head. Right here.” (Points to the back of his head.) “He doesn’t have any (other) injury.”
The Pentagon did not respond to the BBC‘s request for comments.
"Most victims of #KabulAirportBlast were not killed by the blast but by bullets fired at them by the Americans."
Faisal of Kabul Lovers channel interviewed aid workers at Emergency Hospital in #Kabul and this is what they have to say: pic.twitter.com/vvQETq6uEe
There’s another video going around from a popular channel called Kabul Lovers which as of this writing has over 122,000 views. According to a translation posted by Sangar Paykhar of the podcast Afghan Eye, workers at an emergency hospital in Kabul are saying that most of the fatalities from the blast actually died by bullets fired from above, which would track with what the BBC witness said about gunfire coming from the towers where American and Turkish soldiers were.
“Some people have said that victims were shot from behind by Daesh [ISIS],” a man who says he’s a military officer tells Kabul Lovers in the translated subtitles. “However, none of them were shot from behind. All bullet holes came from above. Bullets came from this angle [gesturing to indicate a downward trajectory], striking skulls, necks and chests. No bullet holes from this area below. Which means all these people were pressed against each other. There was no uncovered place for bullets to land, from the chest above. They were all shot by Americans from that area [again gesturing to show a downward trajectory].”
“All victims were killed by American bullets except maybe 20 people out of 100,” the man said.
A Pentagon official says 2 suicide bombers "assessed to have been ISIS fighters" and "ISIS gunmen" killed 12 US service members and injured 15 US service members, and caused many Afghan casualties as well pic.twitter.com/bl6BHHgdqm
The Pentagon, which is refusing to answer BBC reporters’ questions about these latest claims, had reported that there was fire from “ISIS gunmen” following detonations by two suicide bombers. Yet as of this writing there don’t appear to be any reports of any bodies of ISIS gunmen having been recovered since the attack.
“The attack on the Abbey Gate was followed by a number of ISIS gunmen who opened fire on civilian and military forces,” CENTCOM’s General Kenneth McKenzie told the press after the incident.
It seems unlikely that ISIS could lead such a gunfire attack on such a heavily defended area and then get away without any of their members getting killed by return fire, which means if there are no bodies of ISIS fighters then the “ISIS gunmen” the Pentagon reported probably never existed. It was probably just military personnel from the US and/or its allies spraying people with bullets in panic and confusion, after which someone made up a convenient story.
Which is just ghastly to think about. We may or may not know more in the coming days as the notoriously secretive US military narrative manages the situation, but the idea that this deadly incident could have been a lot less deadly if people with powerful firearms in their hands had been better trained and thought more clearly is painful.
As violent as western police can get, it’s hard to imagine even them freaking out after an explosion and opening fire into a crowd of people. The armed goon squads we unleash upon people in war zones are on a whole other level than the ones we have to deal with at home, and the fewer of them we have deployed around the world the better.
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Suicide bombers struck the crowded gates of Kabul airport with at least two explosions on Thursday, causing a bloodbath among civilians, shutting down the Western airlift of Afghans desperate to flee the Taliban regime.
The death toll from the attack is at least 175, including 13 US soldiers, according to media reports.
The attacks came amid ongoing chaos around the airport amid the American withdrawal after 20 years in the region.
Fijian lawyer Ana Tuiketei-Bolabiu has reiterated the Hague Court’s call for all parties to the hostilities to fully respect their obligations under international humanitarian law, including by ensuring the protection of civilians.
She said the ICC may exercise jurisdiction over any genocide, crime against humanity or war crime committed in Afghanistan since the country joined the court in 2003.
First woman counsel
Tuiketei-Bolabiu became the first woman counsel appointed to the Hague Court in April last year. In September, she was elected to the Defence and Membership Committee of the ICC’s Bar Association.
She told RNZ Pacific she is concerned about reports of revenge killings and persecution of women and girls in Afghanistan.
“It’s just an evolving and deteriorating situation in Afghanistan,” she said.
“The UN Security met in New York to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and what was interesting to hear from the Afghani UN ambassador Ghulam Isaczai confirming his concerns on human rights violations for girls, women and human rights defenders, and journalists, including the internally displaced people.
“He also elaborated on the fear of the Kabul residents from the house-to-house search carried out by the Taliban, registering of names and the hunt for people.
“The UN meeting also discussed safety, security, dignity and peace but also trying to protect the lives and the movement of women and children, the international community, displaced people and even the food and all the other humanitarian care that is supposed to be given to the people there.
“We’re hoping that the international human rights laws will actually be observed.”
UN chief Antonio Guterres has also called for an end to the fighting in Afghanistan.
Challenges for prosecutor Tuiketei-Bolabiu said challenges lay ahead for the Hague Court’s new prosecutor, Karim Khan, who replaced Fatou Bensouda in June this year.
Khan inherits the long-running investigation by his predecessor into possible crimes committed in Afghanistan since 2003.
Those included alleged killings of civilians by the Taliban, as well as the alleged torture of prisoners by Afghan authorities, and by American forces and the CIA in 2003-2004.
Tuiketei-Bolabiu said the ICC only approved a formal investigation in March 2020, which prompted then US President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on Bensouda.
“In May, Afghanistan pleaded with Bensouda for a deferral of the ICC prosecution investigation, arguing that the government was already conducting its own inquiries, mostly focusing on alleged Taliban crimes,” she said.
“Under ICC rules, the court only has power to prosecute crimes committed on the territory of member states when they are unwilling or unable to do so themselves.”
It is not yet clear how the ICC will proceed with the current investigation.
People disembark from an Australian Air Force plane after being evacuated from Afghanistan Image: Jacqueline Forrester/Australian Defence Force
Interests of justice
But Tuiketei-Bolabiu is adamant justice will prevail.
“In March last year, the ICC appeals chamber judges found that in the interest of justice investigations should proceed by the prosecution on war crimes since 2003 including armed conflicts and other serious crimes that fall within the jurisdiction of the courts and that includes the Taliban, Afghan national police, other security forces and the CIA,” she said.
“What’s interesting now is the ICC does not have a police force so it solely relies on member states for arrests and investigations. Now the political landscape in Afghanistan has extremely changed.
“The cooperation with the ICC prosecutions office to support the court’s independence will become a bigger challenge in the future.”
UN Human Rights Council meets The UN Human Rights Council held a special session this week to address the serious human rights concerns and the situatiation in Afghanistan.
The meeting was called by the council’s Afghanistan and Pakistan members.
Discussions were centred on the appointment of a committee to investigate crimes against humanity.
Tuiketei-Bolabiu said any evidence from the human rights council would help the court’s investigations.
But Amnesty International said the UN council has failed the people of Afghanistan.
In a statement, Amnesty said the meeting neglected to establish an independent mechanism to monitor ongoing crimes under international law and human rights violations and abuses in Afghanistan.
“Such a mechanism would allow for monitoring and reporting on human rights violations and abuses, including grave crimes under international law, and to assist in holding those suspected of criminal responsibility to justice in fair trials.”
However, the calls were ignored by UNHRC member states, who adopted by consensus a weak resolution which merely requests further reports and an update by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in March 2022, which adds little to the oversight process already in place.
“The UN Human Rights Council special session has failed to deliver a credible response to the escalating human rights crisis in Afghanistan. Member states have ignored clear and consistent calls by civil society and UN actors for a robust monitoring mechanism,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary-general.
“Many people in Afghanistan are already at grave risk of reprisal attacks. The international community must not betray them, and must urgently increase efforts to ensure the safe evacuation of those wishing to leave,” she said.
Amnesty International said member states must now move beyond handwringing, and take meaningful action to protect those feeling the conflict in Afghanistan.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
We don’t talk nearly enough about the fact that wealthy and powerful people are constantly pouring vast fortunes into manipulating the way we perceive our world and that this is the ultimate source of all our major problems.
Democracy is a meaningless concept when the primary factor in determining how votes will be cast is the wealth that plutocrats have poured into mass-scale media psyops to manipulate public perception of reality.
People babble about “freedom” in a society where almost everyone’s mind is in a cage built by the powerful. Caged birds singing that they can do whatever they want inside their cage.
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Covid could just as easily have been used to transfer wealth downward as upward. The only reason wealth has shifted to the wealthiest among us instead of the most needful is because we have systems in place which allow money to translate to political influence and policy making.
Without such vast wealth inequality the public would have the money to crowdfund their own political campaigns, legislative initiatives and media outlets. That’s why the rich actively work to keep others poor. It’s not so they can buy one more private jet, it’s to maintain power.
Because money is power and power is relative, the plutocrats have a natural incentive to use their financial clout to shape things so the majority remains poor. We have a system which makes you king if you’re richer than the masses; if everyone’s king then no one is king.
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We’re as angry as we ought to be, but because of careful narrative manipulation our anger is directed at each other instead of the people at the top. People often have more emotionality toward someone expressing the wrong opinion about AOC or ivermectin than they have toward the oligarchy.
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The mass media could just as easily have spent this time framing the Afghanistan withdrawal as a good thing and applauding Biden for doing it, and if they had Biden’s approval would be soaring and everyone would think the withdrawal was great. These people control perception of reality.
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Invade a nation, kill hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, stay for decades, accomplish nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy, drop everything and leave, then have your armed goon squad take PR photos with local infants so everyone thinks your military is awesome.
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Afghanistan has been captured by a tyrannical violent extremist group and I hear the group that’s replacing them when they complete their withdrawal is pretty bad too.
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The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics will be split between news media reporters for their breakthrough discovery of the existence of women in Afghanistan.
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My neighbor attacked me when she caught me in her house at night going through her valuables. This proves she’s always wanted to attack me in my home. I need to go fight her over there so I don’t have to fight her here.
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Just in case you were wondering if the mass media had run out of the absolute worst people to consult about US wars:
The future of American power – Henry Kissinger on why America failed in Afghanistan https://t.co/X60m0MTv3Z
A: Free speech is when war profiteers are allowed to openly lobby for more wars and the mass media are allowed to brazenly lie to us and corporations are allowed to buy government officials and members of the public are allowed to say whatever they want as long as they say it quietly in the privacy of their own home.
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When poor people claim that spies are attacking their brains with high tech ray guns it’s called paranoid schizophrenia. When government officials say it it’s called Havana Syndrome.
Saying America’s warmongering has “come home” whenever it abuses its citizenry is a bit dramatic. Get back to me when there are nonstop airstrikes on major US cities and depleted uranium in LA and military blockades on Texas are starving children to death by the thousands.
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Modern mainstream western culture is just mass-produced propaganda for the idea that worldwide human behavior should be driven by consumption and the pursuit of profit.
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The fact that spiritual enlightenment is a real and attainable thing is possibly the most under-discussed and under-appreciated political reality in ourworld, because it has huge, sweeping political implications since it could solve all our problems if collectively realized. But whether we discuss it or not it might happen anyway as humanity approaches its adapt-or-die point.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
A suicide bombing near Kabul airport on Thursday added another dimension to the chaos in Afghanistan as Western forces rush to complete their evacuation.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blasts that killed at least 175 people, including 13 US soldiers, challenging the Taliban’s hold on the capital.
Either group is bad news for Afghan women and girls, and anyone with links to the former government or exiting armies.
Taliban officials are on a charm offensive in international media, with one suggesting to Newsweek the group could contribute to fighting climate change if formally recognised by other governments.
Don’t expect the Taliban to consign coal to history any time soon, though. The militant group gets a surprisingly large share of its revenue from mining — more than from the opium trade — and could scale up coal exports to pay salaries as it seeks to govern.
Afghan people could certainly use support to cope with the impacts of climate change. The UN estimates more than 10 million are at risk of hunger due to the interplay of conflict and drought.
Janine Jackson interviewed Phyllis Bennis, director of theNew Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, about the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan for the August 20, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin210820Bennis.mp3
Janine Jackson: Many people in this country and around the world have long been calling for the US military to get out of Afghanistan. Many, of course, the same people who opposed the 2001 invasion in the first place. Now that President Biden has made that call, what might happen next? What responsibilities does the US still have in and to Afghanistan? And what can we hope for, in terms of the possibility of the Afghan people taking charge of their future?
We’re joined now by Phyllis Bennis. She directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and is author of Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terrorism and Ending the US War in Afghanistan:A Primer, among other titles. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.
JJ: As events in Afghanistan are evolving quickly, I will note that we’re recording Tuesday, August 17. And I would start, just as you do in your new piece for The Nation: We have a lot of questions right now about what’s going to happen. But what can we say about what we’re seeing in Afghanistan, and what may come next?
PB: I think that it’s very important that we recognize the significance of pulling out US troops, and the limitation of pulling out US troops. The significance is that this is a war that never should have been waged. The horrific crimes of 9/11 should have been dealt with as international horrific crimes, and not as the beginning of a global war, in which the US interests would be asserted as taking precedence over the interests of every other country, every other people, in the world.
And once it started, it should have ended. Once it was going for a year, it should have ended. Once it went for 10 years, it should have ended. It’s finally ending now, almost 20 years on. That’s way too late. But it’s important that it is ending, the US role.
The limitation of that is that this does not end the struggle, and potentially even war, in Afghanistan. The war is going to be very different without the United States. But people in Afghanistan have a very difficult time ahead. Certainly the people who are afraid of what Taliban control could mean for them and their families personally, because of either their real or perceived connections to the US military, to US intelligence, and to other perceived and accurately known as Western institutions, whether it’s journalists, whether it’s non-governmental organizations, all kinds of people. Women who’ve fought for women’s rights over these last 20 years, many of them are very afraid of being linked to the US occupation and targeted for that, as well as being targeted for being strong women with an independent streak at all.
So there’s a lot of problems ahead for Afghans. Pulling out the US troops, I think, was the most important part of it.
JJ: It’s been odd to see some in the US news media lay the entire state of affairs at Biden’s feet, as though everything was going great somehow until he mucked it up. But you explain in The Nation that there are things that we can and should be demanding of the US government now. We can’t undo what the US military did to the Afghan people. But there are things that we can be talking about right now, in terms of accountability.
PB: Absolutely. And I think accountability to the people of Afghanistan should remain our focal point for this next period. First, the number of refugees, asylum seekers, should be massively expanded. We have to expand the categories of people who are allowed in. And, crucially, we have to make it easier, make it possible for people to apply for and get that protection. It’s a huge challenge now, because people that are not already in Kabul may not be able to get to Kabul anytime soon. People in Kabul may have trouble getting to the airport.
But it’s also made harder because the United States, unlike every other country, is not simply opening their borders to people who clearly need protection. They’re demanding that people still fill out all kinds of paperwork that may not be possible right now. So we need to demand that they make it easier, that they make it possible, for people to apply for asylum, for refugee status, for protection, in any way that it becomes necessary.
Second, we need to be sure that the bombing raids, both of planes, including B-52s, and drones that have been carried out in recent weeks, have stopped, and that the end of those bombing raids is permanent. The same for the CIA squads that are running death squads throughout Afghanistan. That should be permanently ended, not just at this moment, ready to come back from over the horizon.
Third, we need to be supporting UN and whatever other international efforts emerge to create and defend a humanitarian corridor, guaranteeing safe passage for humanitarian workers to get people in and to get access to water, food, shelter, medicine, for people that are living now in Kabul and other places who have been displaced from their homes, can’t get to their homes, and are stuck wherever they are in desperate need.
That has to include funding a massive program for Covid assistance. We’ve all seen the videos, the photographs, of people crowded together, living on streets in Kabul, etc. And these people are smack in the middle of a rising number of Covid cases already. This could become another disaster facing people in Afghanistan.
Phyllis Bennis: “We need to begin the process of acknowledging US responsibility for the impact of the war, the devastation that the war brought to the people of Afghanistan.”
And finally, finally, Janine, I think it’s so crucial, even though it will be a long process, to assess what was wrong about this war from the beginning, why it was so easy for people to support this war, and why people in positions of power consistently supported it, with so few exceptions, like that of the heroic congressional representative from California, Barbara Lee, who was the only member of Congress to vote against the authorization for this war. That’s going to be a long process.
But in the meantime, we need to begin the process of acknowledging US responsibility for the impact of the war, the devastation that the war brought to the people of Afghanistan. We can work on that for years, the issues of reparations and compensation, questions of apology. But right now, we need to move towards acknowledgement that there was a US responsibility for what faced the people of Afghanistan during these 20 years.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally: Media have a lot to account for, I think, here. News media just have a “war” frame of mind, if you put it that way. Diplomacy, it seems, is almost treated as a weakness. And that’s exactly the kind of conversation we need to be having. But I fear that folks are going to be poorly served if we’re looking for that kind of healthy conversation about the future for the Afghan people in mainstream news media.
PB: I think you’re right that the news media, the mainstream news media, need to have some serious conversations. And we in the public need to demand those answers for the role that the media played for 20 years, from the moment of the 9/11 attacks, assuming the legitimacy of war as an answer.
I do have a small hint of optimism, based on the coverage of the last few days. Because there has already started to be some looking back. There’s been a couple of articles, not a lot. But you do see hints in the Washington Post and the New York Times and on NPR. Not enough, not nearly enough. But the beginnings of a more self-critical look, not necessarily at the media itself—
JJ: Right.
PB: —but at the assumptions that were at the root of how the media covered all this, which comes back to the question of the legitimacy of war as the dominant component of how US influence around the world is expressed. And to the degree that we can force that conversation to go further, that will be one of the key things to prevent something like this horrific invasion, occupation, 20-year oppression of Afghanistan that our country was involved with from ever happening again.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her article, “Washington’s War in Afghanistan Is Over. What Happens Now?” appears inTheNation.com. Thank you, Phyllis Bennis, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Janine Jackson interviewed Matthew Hoh, senior fellow with theCenter for International Policy and a member of theEisenhower Media Network, about the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan for the August 20, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Here is the New York Times‘ August 15 editorial:
The war in Afghanistan began in response by the United States and its NATO allies to the attacks of September 11, 2001, as an operation to deny Al Qaeda sanctuary in a country run by the Taliban. How it evolved into a two-decade nation-building project in which as many as 140,000 troops under American command were deployed at one time is a story of mission creep and hubris, but also of the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy.
A graduate thesis might be devoted to unpacking the assumption, euphemism, denial, just the sheer Kool-Aid in that little story. But suffice to say the fact that this is the country’s paper of record telling anyone curious how best to understand what they’re currently seeing unfold in Afghanistan is troubling.
There are other ways to understand. They involve listening to other voices than those corporate media tend to foreground. If we’d been hearing those other voices all along, who knows how different today’s conversation would be.
Matthew Hoh: Hi, thank you so much for having me on.
JJ: We read about a 20-year war. And I understand that. But I wonder if you would take a minute to draw a bigger historical picture. Because it’s meaningful for the people who should be at the center of the story and yet somehow never quite really are, namely the Afghan people. This is more than 20 years for them.
MH: Absolutely. And thank you for bringing up this point. I think the commentary that puts this war in a 20-year perspective is indicative of why the United States has failed so miserably in Afghanistan.
The United States has wanted this war in Afghanistan to be about Al Qaeda and 9/11. And certainly that’s what Joe Biden tried to do in his remarks the other day. And the reality is that this is a living legacy of the Cold War. This war begins, I think you could fairly start it, in 1973, when the king is deposed. And since that time—same year I was born, 48 years ago—there has been nothing but political chaos or violence, war, in Afghanistan. And the majority of that has been instigated to a degree, and supported greatly, by outside nations, chiefly the United States.
And what makes the tragedy about Afghanistan even more tragic is so much of this war, so much of this violence and suffering, it’s got almost nothing to do with the Afghans themselves.
The United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s looked at Afghanistan as a forum of competition: Who is going to get Afghanistan to reflect their color on the map?
JJ: Right.
Zbigniew Brzezinski (cc photo: CSIS)
MH: Is Afghanistan going to be blue, or is it going to be red? And so I think that’s why you have these circumstances that unfold from that.
In 1979, before the Soviet Union invades, the Carter administration launches a policy of supporting Islamist rebel groups in Afghanistan, because in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, in Brzezinski’s vision, the idea would be that we would utilize these Islamist rebel groups in Afghanistan to cause problems in Afghanistan, to bait the Soviet Union into invasion and give them their own Vietnam. And this occurs six months before the Soviet Union invades.
And so the Soviet Union does that. And the Soviet Union, of course, is certainly responsible for its actions. And one of the things we know about the Soviet Union’s decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979 was that it was in many ways influenced by the American removal from Iran. You can find this in discussions from the notes from the Politburo from the time. But the Soviets are worried that because the Americans lost their bases in Iran, that the Americans are now going to go into Afghanistan.
So even from this vantage point, you’re right, I mean, 40-some odd years later, you can still see, in our current decision making, how little of the United States’ decisions about Afghanistan have been about the Afghans themselves.
Certainly 9/11, where you’re talking about an organization of less than 400 people, Al Qaeda, 400 people worldwide, 9/11 attacks, where none of the hijackers were Afghans. Almost all of the planning, the training, the support for the attacks came from Pakistan, from Germany. The hijackers met in Malaysia, in Spain, possibly in the UAE or Qatar. And then, of course, we had hijackers here in this country for 18 months before the attacks. The most important training the hijackers received was in American flight academies and martial arts academies. But somehow it’s about Afghanistan.
Risk board
And the United States, of course, is not the only one who is culpable in this. The Pakistanis, the Iranians, the Indians, the Russians, etc., many different nations have been playing what used to be called in the 19th century “The Great Game”—
JJ: Right.
MH: —you know, treating Afghanistan as if it is a real-life version of the game Risk.
JJ: Exactly.
MH: And the Afghan people have just endured unbelievable suffering because of that.
JJ: I was actually just going to invoke the game Risk. It’s all like an abstract chess game, as it were, and US media sort of present it that way. And had no hesitancy to move the goalposts: “Well, we’re punishing Al Qaeda.” “No, we’re saving women.” “No, we’re building a nation state.” It’s as if the goal doesn’t matter, because you’re just supposed to get behind whatever the US is doing.
Right now, US media news consumers are seeing chaos and calamity. And it’s being reported as being caused by the withdrawal of US troops. So a binary mindset says, “No! I don’t like chaos. Put the troops back.” Unfortunately, the general run of media coverage doesn’t really stay at a level much more subtle than that. So I want to ask you, how do we gird ourselves? What should we be holding in mind as this very war-framed conversation swirls around us in the coming days and weeks?
MH: I think we want to think that the events that are occurring right now, we have complete agency over, and they’re not influenced by the past, not influenced by history. And I think we have to be very much aware of that. So as you hear people say why we shouldn’t leave Afghanistan—I wish I was joking about this, but you see commentators, serious commentators, as people in DC would describe them: “If we’re not in Afghanistan, then the Chinese will be.” That’s what the Soviet Union said: “If we’re not in Afghanistan, then the Americans will be.”
That’s what the British said in the 19th century: “If we’re not in Afghanistan, the Russians will be.” Turns out the Russians never had any plan to invade Afghanistan in the 19th century. But the British invaded Afghanistan at least three times because of that.
So I think it’s important to tie ourselves to history, to understand how the same things keep unfolding. One of the things I think is important, too, is that, look, Joe Biden was in office, he was a US senator, when the Vietnam War ended. Just because something happened 50 years ago doesn’t mean that our people who are in power making these decisions aren’t the legacies of that.
Just as I described the Afghan War as being a living legacy of the Cold War, it still exists.
Take a man like Donald Rumsfeld. I had this experience one time when I was in the Marine Corps, and Donald Rumsfeld came up to me, and he pointed at a portrait of Eisenhower that myself and a friend were standing in front of. And he said, “You know how old I am? I’m so old I used to work with that guy.”
And so you can understand that. The man who was in charge of the Defense Department at the end of Vietnam had worked with Dwight Eisenhower. Dwight Eisenhower was old enough to have known and worked with Civil War veterans. So we’re not actually that far removed from history.
So to think that what occurred in the 1970s in Afghanistan, what occurred in the 1980s in Afghanistan, what occurred in the 1990s, doesn’t have repercussions now is one of the reasons why, I think, that the media coverage and people’s understanding of the war is so very basic, is so limited.
Certainly there’s a legacy to this. There are events that occurred, there are reasons for this. Why would the Taliban have such popular support from the Afghan people? Maybe there’s a history to it.
Look, in this country, if anyone was to say to any of us that the Civil War is a forgotten relic of American history, and doesn’t influence current culture, politics, society, whatever, we would say you’re absolutely crazy.
JJ: Right.
MH: We have a media that reports about Afghanistan as if only what has occurred within the last week or last month matters.
Take, just for example, the Doha Agreement, signed between the Taliban and the United States, signed in February 2020. That was almost 18 months ago. There has been very little media discussion about what happened in those 18 months, when negotiations were supposed to be occurring between the Taliban and the Afghan government. It’s almost as if that time doesn’t factor, or matter.
The reporting will say, basically, “Doha Agreement signed February 2020. May 1, 2021, Biden says we’re pulling troops out.” No discussion whatsoever about, well, how come nothing occurred? Why weren’t negotiations successful? What prompted this to play out this way, where the Taliban, in my opinion, basically said, “Hey, we’ve given you 18 months to negotiate. We’re just going to take it now.”
JJ: Yeah.
MH: As well as, too, just that type of discussion where the Taliban have agency, where the Taliban need to be understood as an army and a political organization that is not the narrative we have of these troglodytes in caves.
JJ: And so, when we’re going to hear—as we’re going to hear, as we move toward September 11—“We need to begin bombing again because terrorism,” we have to hold in our mind that things are more complicated. But that our role is fairly simple, in terms of saying, “No, we’re not. Bombing for peace is not going to work.”
Matthew Hoh: “You’ve seen terror groups increase by a factor of five. How can anyone say that this has been successful?” (image: BillMoyers.com)
MH: Absolutely correct. I think there’s a lot of very good evidence, very clear evidence, that bombing for peace does not work.
Look, we mentioned earlier that Al Qaeda was 400 people total on 9/11. Total, worldwide. And because of the US response to the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda grew into an organization of tens and tens of thousands of members. They expanded to a presence around the world, where they had the fighting capability to take over and control entire cities and regions. We now have the Islamic State as a consequence of that.
So anyone who thinks that the United States’ war against terror has been successful because of the occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., simply is either foolish or is lying about it. Because how can anyone look at what happened with Al Qaeda international terror groups, and say that they have been defeated over the last 20 years? They may at this point not be as capable as they previously were. But they have not been defeated, and they have benefited greatly from the American response to 9/11.
And just another quick data point on that. In 2001, the United States State Department said there were four international terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year, the United States State Department and the US military said that there are 20 international terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So by pursuing this policy in Afghanistan, by pursuing this war, as well as the war that was conducted in Pakistan as well, where tens and tens of thousands of people were killed, you’ve seen terror groups increase by a factor of five. How can anyone say that this has been successful?
But what we have seen, though, is an evolution of American warfare that tries to hide the cost of war from the American people, and that will allow these wars to continue. Because I think most Americans are not aware that, since 9/11, US troops, in at least 15 countries, not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but 15 countries, have been killed and have killed in combat since 9/11. But most of that is hidden from the American public, and that’s a very deliberate thing that the US government, military and CIA does.
JJ: We’ll be taking this up with you, I’m sure, further in the future. For now, we’ve been speaking with Matthew Hoh of the Center for International Policy and the Eisenhower Media Network. His piece, “What Critics of the US Withdrawal From Afghanistan Get Wrong,” appears onCNN.com. And “A Cruel and Unjust Peace for Afghanistan” can be found onNewsweek.com. Thank you so much, Matthew Hoh, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
ISIS has reportedly claimed credit for an explosion near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. So the US war machine will continue to rain down highly profitable explosives upon Afghanistan for as long as it likes, using this attack as justification for more military operations instead of taking it as yet another sign that what it has been doing is not working and keeps making things worse.
