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.
Afghan journalists and civil servants described desperation, terror and panic as they waited for a chance to evacuate after multiple bomb blasts killed dozens of people and injured scores in Kabul on Thursday.
Sources on the ground told Truthout they heard multiple explosions and gunfire near the airport in Afghanistan’s capital city, where thousands of people have gathered in hopes of fleeing the country on U.S. military airplanes and international charter flights. At least two suicide bombers detonated themselves in separate attacks on Thursday outside the airport and near a hotel, killing at least 60 people, including at least 13 American servicemembers, according to reports. ISIS-K, a group reportedly affiliated with the Islamic State, claimed responsibility for the bombings and gun attacks on civilians and U.S. personnel.
M.E.M, an Afghan journalist who declined to give his full name due to fear of reprisal, recently resigned from his position at a prominent Afghan television network and news outlet as the Taliban took over the country due to “serious threats” to his safety. M.E.M was still waiting to evacuate when Truthout reached him by phone at his home in Kabul on Thursday.
“This morning a number of Taliban searched my house, but fortunately I was somewhere else,” M.E.M said, adding that he believes he has been accused by the Taliban of spying on behalf of the U.S. and assisting U.S. forces.
M.E.M. says he is certainly not a spy, and his press credentials and related documents show that he has covered relations between NATO and the Afghan government for an independent news agency.
M.E.M. has applied for a U.S. Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) under a State Department program that allows Afghans employed on behalf of the U.S. government relocate to the U.S. M.E.M says he is an independent journalist but is sponsored by an American colleague, and some of his coworkers have already been evacuated.
M.E.M was advised that evacuations would continue after President Biden’s August 31 deadline for withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, but he fears time is running out.
“They are promising me to evacuate me, but I don’t know what they are going to tell me,” M.M.E said.
The White House reports that U.S. and coalition airplanes evacuated 13,400 people from Kabul on Wednesday and Thursday, and the U.S. has relocated more than 101,300 people since July. However, Pentagon and NATO officials are still scrambling to evacuate Afghan colleagues in Kabul under the SIV resettlement program, according to prospective refugees stranded in Kabul. Others are still desperately searching for sponsors and approval under the SIV program.
As Afghans rush to evacuate, it’s become increasingly unclear who is eligible for the SIV program, as many members of Kabul’s civil society have participated in one U.S.-backed development program or another. A group of 67 House Democrats sent a letter to President Biden on Thursday demanding that the U.S. increase the annual admissions cap for refugees from 125,000 to 200,000 in order to allow more Afghans to evacuate and resettle.
“The urgent need to double down on our efforts to welcome and protect refugees is evidenced by the racist, virulent anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment that exploded over the last decade — often as a result of U.S.-fueled wars — and was further heightened under the last administration and now with the evacuations occurring in Afghanistan,” the lawmakers wrote.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki declined to comment specifically on the letter from House Democrats on Thursday but said that the U.S. is doing everything in its power to evacuate as many Afghans as possible. In an earlier news conference, Biden said that “millions” of Afghans would choose to come to the U.S. if given a chance, but indicated no plans to dramatically increase the U.S.’s refugee resettlement program. He emphasized the U.S. would stick to its original August 31 deadline for withdrawing forces from the country.
Afghan journalists said the U.S. government must do more to address a humanitarian crisis that ultimately resulted from the invasion of Afghanistan 20 years ago.
“We think the U.S. [is facing] a humanitarian issue and should help Afghans such as me who are in danger of death,” said Abdul Lafif Badii, a former freelance journalist and university student in Kabul who said he worked to promote free speech and fair elections in Afghanistan, in an interview.
Badii said he was waiting near the airport for a chance to evacuate on Thursday and fled home after the first suicide bomb detonated, killing Afghan civilians as well as U.S. servicemembers running security at the airport. Badii said his brother was a soldier in the Afghan military and was killed by the Taliban in a battle in Ghazni province, and his father was killed earlier in the war by a landmine. He is currently hiding at home in Kabul with his mother, the last remaining member of his family.
Abdul Khabeer Zhabzeez, a journalist, social activist and former civil servant in Kabul, said people were in a state of shock and panic near the airport and Afghan government offices as bomb blasts and gunfire erupted on Thursday. Zhabzeez, who was waiting to flee Kabul outside the airport on Thursday, fled home after the first blast. He said hundreds of people have been severely injured, including women and children. Other Afghan civil servants, journalists and students also said they fled the airport and are currently hiding in their homes.
“Really after the U.S. abandoned us in the firewall and submitted Afghanistan to the Taliban, everything is devastated and destroyed,” Zhabzeez said in an encrypted text message. “Here we have no more way of breathing, and we don’t know [what the future will bring].”
Like other desperate Afghans who contacted Truthout, Zhabzeez has contacted the State Department and requested a Special Immigrant Visa to be evacuated and relocated but has not received a response. To qualify for the visa, Afghans generally must have worked for a U.S. or coalition agency or have a sponsor within the U.S. government. This, of course, excludes millions of Afghans urgently wanting to leave. In some cases, Afghans are evacuating to countries such as Mexico, Uganda and Qatar, where visas are easier to obtain.
Biden decided to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and occupation failed to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, but refugee and human rights groups say the U.S. failed to make adequate plans for evacuating and relocating vulnerable Afghans before the withdrawal.
“It is also very clear that all those who worked and engaged in the ex-government, or in any other NGOs, civic groups and activists, are definitely under threat,” Zhabzeez said.
We speak with Haroun Rahimi, assistant professor of law at the American University of Afghanistan, about the Islamic State affiliate that claimed responsibility for this week’s devastating suicide bombings at Kabul airport, which killed more than 110 people, including 13 U.S. troops. Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, is a puritanical group that is “critical of all other sects of Islam,” says Rahimi. “Whatever Muslim that thinks differently than them is a major target for them.” He says the group’s name refers to a region of the former Islamic empire and is an attempt to reestablish “some past lost glory” in a bid to attract disaffected Muslim youth.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the crisis in Afghanistan, a day after at least 95 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops were killed after a pair of suicide bombings in Kabul just outside Hamid Karzai International Airport. The militant group ISIS-K has taken responsibility.
We’re joined in Istanbul, Turkey, by Haroun Rahimi, assistant professor of law at the American University of Afghanistan. He was en route back to Kabul two weeks ago when he heard the news of the Taliban takeover and stayed in Turkey. He tweeted Thursday, “Please don’t ask me for the foreseeable future how I am doing. I am not doing well. No Afghan is.”
Professor Rahimi, welcome back to Democracy Now!
HAROUNRAHIMI: Thank you for having me.
AMYGOODMAN: Who are the ISIS-K?
HAROUNRAHIMI: So, there are different ways to answer that question. You can look at their ideological leaning. You can look at their fighters, composition of their fighters. You can look at their objectives. And you would come up with different answers. You can look at their logistical kind of roots and their methods and come up with different answers.
Ideologically, it’s a group that is often called — it’s subscribed to a specific brand of Islamist kind of politics called Salafism. It’s a reactionary, modern phenomenon that seeks to reestablish their reimagined Muslim past. They often are very critical of everyone. They’re puritan. They are critical of all other sects of Islam. Whatever Muslim that thinks differently than them is a major target for them. They target Shias and other Muslims who disagree with them on any matter. And they’ve actually considered them called them the close enemy, compared to distant enemy, which will be the West or the Americans.
In terms of their fighters, they make up — they don’t have a lot of fighters in Afghanistan. It was a branch of the infamous ISIS which emerged in Syria and Iraq. But kind of a regional branch of it emerged in Afghanistan because of some of the connections that existed historically between eastern part of the country and the Arab world, and that — through which the Salafism, that kind of particular understanding of Islam, had spread to the eastern part of the country. Some Arab fighters — some foreign fighters, including Arab fighters, when the ISIS was disseminated in Iraq and Syria, came there, and there were also some local Afghans who joined them, because they felt more ideological alignment with them or they saw it as the opportunity to join a group that was seen by many as resource-rich at the time.
In terms of objectives, they are very anti — as I said, they are very against all other types of Muslims who disagree with them. They have fought with Taliban. They had many fights. They also fight — they target Shias, which are a sect of Muslims in Afghanistan, make up a large minority in the country. They’ve fought the government of Afghanistan, as well. Right now they seem to portray the Taliban as allies of the United States, and they wish to target both, as they did in the last attack, the horrendous attack on Kabul airport.
So, I mean, kind of there are different ways to answer that question, but it’s a complex reality on the ground. How powerful it is, many have concluded that it’s not that powerful anymore, after it was beaten down by the Taliban, the government and international allies, international forces. It still have some followers, sleeper cells in urban areas, because ISIS tends to recruit more kind of educated, middle-class, young members, compared to the rural base of Taliban. So, it has a lot of — it has a number of sleeper cells, for sure, in Kabul, and several of those obviously were responsible for the attack we saw yesterday.
AMYGOODMAN: On August 14th, when Taliban swept into the vacuum in Kabul, they executed Abu Omar Khorasani, the imprisoned former head of the Islamic State of South Asia, of ISIS-K. They were freeing people in the prison. They pulled him out. He had been there apparently for years. And they executed him. Also, explain what Khorasan, ISIS-K, for Khorasan — and his name, Khorasani — stands for.
HAROUNRAHIMI: So, Khorasan is kind of a region. You have to realize that the ISIS does not believe in nation-states. So, they believe in a caliphate that has a universal claim. So, all — everywhere in the world falls within the realm or the jurisdiction of the caliphate, but they had regional kind of representation, often with the name of a region as a qualifier. The name Khorasan refers to the eastern part of the Muslim empire, when Islam was an empire, and covers regions like Iran and Afghanistan. And they’re using kind of the older name that referred to that part of the world in relationship with the past Muslim empire.
Obviously, it has symbolic significance. Again, as I said, they are reimagining the Muslim past in modern times as a way to mobilize often disenfranchised and alienated Muslim youth who are angry for different reasons, for the — kind of with the claims and hopes of reestablishing some past lost glory, which is obviously a reconstructed and reimagined past. That’s why the terminology and kind of the names often have those kind of symbolic past kind of pedigree.
AMYGOODMAN: With President Biden vowing revenge for the suicide attacks, do you see the U.S. and Taliban working together — ISIS-K is also the enemy of Taliban, as we know — to target them?
HAROUNRAHIMI: Absolutely. I mean, supposedly, they have already. The United States military said they had been exchanging information, sanitized information, meaning informations that were often — sometimes may not be full information. But some information was passed on to the Taliban to help them prevent such attacks. And the U.S. military claims that some attacks were prevented through those information sharing.
And there is a — moving forward, Taliban are the de facto government on the ground. And counterterrorism is going to be the main issue remaining, from the U.S. perspective, and the only partner they have on the ground, really, given that they have withdrawn — they are going to be withdrawing all troops, would be the Taliban. And it seems like the U.S. is counting on Taliban’s self-interest, to use Biden’s words, to kind of see them as a possible partner — an odd partner, but still a partner — in the counterterrorism attack, at least especially with regard to ISIS-K, because you have to realize there are other terrorist groups active in the region or who have better relationship with the Taliban and there is no enmity between them. For example, al-Qaeda still has strong ties with the Taliban. There’s alignments there. There are many groups that Pakistan, for example, considers a terrorist group. There are many groups that Central Asian countries consider terrorist groups. There are groups that China considers terrorist groups that are active in the region and have good relationship with the Taliban. So, Taliban would not be seen as a strong, robust kind of partner in counterterrorism, in general, but it, with regard to ISIS-K, seems like there have been some cooperation. And moving forward, they will be seen — Taliban will be seen as a partner that can be relied upon in Afghanistan.
AMYGOODMAN: Also, very quickly, the Taliban have not announced their government in Afghanistan. Are they having trouble pulling together this coalition of theirs?
HAROUNRAHIMI: I mean, the Taliban are very good at not having public dissent. So, if there are disagreements inside the movement, they tend to remain inside the movement.
There could be other reasons why they haven’t announced their government. One is that there are still U.S. troops present on Afghan soil. So, the symbolism of announcing a government while the airport is under control of the United States would not be something that they think they wish for. So, if the U.S. troops leaves by the August 31st and they still have a problem announcing government — for example, September 1st, 2nd, 3rd — then I think it would be cause for more serious internal kind of fractions.
Right now I’m sure there are internal kind of fractions. It is not a monolith, and there are different groups. For example, Haqqani network and the Sadr Taliban from Kandahar and Helmand have been in tensions with each other. Kabul is dominated by the Haqqani network, which is kind of a subgroup within the Taliban that controls Kabul at the moment.
So, there are disagreements, but they’ve been good at resolving them and keeping cohesion. And the fact that they haven’t announced a government yet, I don’t think is a strong evidence of severe internal divide, just because of the fact that the U.S. is still in Afghanistan, and Taliban would not have announced a government with the U.S. — with the Kabul airport being under control of Taliban. It would just not happen.
AMYGOODMAN: And finally, Haroun, are you planning at any point soon to go back to Afghanistan? I know the president of American University of Afghanistan, your university, Ian Bickford, apparently has fled the country, according to The Wall Street Journal and others. Will you be coming back?
HAROUNRAHIMI: Absolutely, I mean, obviously, just for to continue my mission of educating Afghan youth, and also just to go back home. That is where my home is. That’s where everyone I love is. I don’t have a large family outside Afghanistan in any meaningful way. All my family is inside Afghanistan. As long as it’s safe and I can be reasonably assured that I will not be harmed and targeted personally, I would definitely go back.
AMYGOODMAN: Haroun Rahimi, I want to thank you so much for being with us, assistant professor of law at American University in Afghanistan. He was en route to Kabul when he heard the news of the Taliban takeover and at this point has stayed in Istanbul, Turkey.
The chaotic evacuation of international ‘assets’ and economic migrants from Kabul airport just got more complicate.
An hour ago a suicide bomber blew himself up amidst a crowd which was waiting to get access to the airport. Additionally gunfire was heard. At least 13 people got killed. There are pictures and video of dozens of killed and wounded Afghans.
Hours ago the U.S. and UK had warned of an imminent ISIS attack on the airport and had asked their citizens to stay away from the airport.
The evacuation flights for civilians were supposed to end today. That was to leave time for the several thousand military on the ground to wrap up their mission before the August 31 end date. The Taliban have insisted on that final date.
Whoever has sent in the suicide bomber wanted to interrupt that process. Your guess who that was is as good as mine.
Soldiers helping kids and a former British marine trying to get rescue animals out of Kabul. These have become some of the dominant images of the western evacuation from Afghanistan. They’ve started to conceal brutal truths – decades in the making – some of which I witnessed there as a soldier and journalist. That cannot be allowed to happen.
We continue to support vulnerable civilians in Afghanistan as they prepare to fly out to safety. As well as helping to secure the airport and evacuating civilians, we've provided blankets, food and water, sanitary packs and baby milk for vulnerable families. pic.twitter.com/2yUqNb5Vy5
The images are heart-warming and sickly sweet. This is precisely the point of them: to humanise and soften a pointless, 20-year war that wreaked untold havoc on one of the poorest nations on earth.
The life of every animal is precious and quite rightly the public is completely behind the hero that is @PenFarthing. Please support @Nowzad and the mission to get his team and animals back to the UK from Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/bexHgzqnWv
As an Afghanistan veteran who has worked as a journalist in the country, I think it’s worth reviewing what that record is before this sickly sweet PR comes to dominate. To do that we can take a look at just a few aspects of the war.
Death toll
Brown University’s Costs of War project, as reported by the US magazine Task and Purpose, registers an astonishing death toll in Afghanistan up to October 2018. Especially for a war which was meant to ‘liberate’ people.
This toll includes 2,401 US military deaths, 3,937 contractor deaths, 58,596 Afghan military and police deaths, 1,141 allied military dead, and (a conservative estimate) 38,480 civilians killed. The number of wounded across all sides – both mentally and physically – is difficult to pin down.
These figures don’t include the scores of Afghans killed and wounded at Kabul airport yesterday on 26 August. Nor the reported 13 US troops who died in the attack claimed by the local branch of ISIS.
BREAKING: A British defence source said it is “highly likely” Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) was responsible for the attacks outside Kabul airport.
Drones became a signature weapon of the War on Terror and were widely used in Afghanistan. Due to the secretive nature of their use, figures are hard to pin down. But The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) maintains a database to map and count deaths and strikes fairly accurately.
TBIJ projects that between 2015 and today over 13,000 strikes have been carried out in Afghanistan. These resulted in between 4,126 and 10,076 deaths over that period. Drones, however, have been in use for much longer. I can recall as a young soldier posted to Kandahar Airfield in 2006, missile-laden Predator drones taking off and landing were a daily sight.
Reports on the reality of the drone war, and its innocent victims, are widely available.
Bombs
The air war was another big part of the Afghan war – distinct from the drone war. As foreign troops drew down in recent years, bombing intensified in support of Afghan military operations. For instance, as reporter Azmat Khan toldDemocracy Now:
the United States was bombing heavily parts of that country where there were fights against the Taliban raging. So, just to give some context, in 2019, the United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war. So, I think it was something close to — more than 6,200 bombs that year, as they were trying to negotiate.
The use of air power, she pointed out, boosted recruitment for the Taliban:
You know, many of its more recent recruits were people who did lose loved ones and really wanted revenge for those casualties.
House raids
Night raids on Afghan homes were another key feature of the war. These involved special forces descending on Afghan’s houses at night, supposedly in search of terrorists. These became highly controversial. In fact, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s own cousin was killed in a raid.
Later this role was handed to CIA-controlled Afghan death squads known as Zero Units. In 2020, I went back to Afghanistan to report on them. We met families whose relatives had been murdered in their homes. Another community was attacked in a night raid resulting in several deaths. This included a young boy whose father dug his body from the rubble of a mosque days later.
Skewed
There is no doubt that the working class soldiers in Kabul airport want to help the kids there. And clearly puppies and kitten have enormous appeal for the British public. But there’s a danger that these images skew our idea of what the Afghan war was actually about. The real story of the conflict is not one of rescuing kids and dogs. It’s one of twenty years of imperial violence and failure in a war that never needed to be fought.
The Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) has dispatched one of its Airbus A330 Multi-Role Tanker Transports (MRTTs) to assist ongoing international efforts to airlift evacuees from Afghanistan. The MRTT, with aircraft bort number 762, departed from Changi Air Base (East) at around 2230 hours local time with a total of 77 Singapore Armed Forces […]
When the tears dry, it is worth considering why there is so much upset about the fall of Kabul (or reconquest) by the Taliban and the messy withdrawal of US-led forces. A large shield is employed: women, rights of the subject, education. Remove the shield, and we are left with a simple equation of power gone wrong in the name of paternalistic warmongering.
The noisiest group of Afghanistan stayers are the neoconservatives resentful because their bit of political real estate is getting away. In being defeated, they are left with the task of explaining to the soldiery that blood was not expended in vain against a foe they failed to defeat. “You took out a brutal enemy,” goes a statement from US President George W. Bush and his wife Laura, “and denied Al Qaeda a safe haven while building schools, sending supplies, and providing medical care.” The couple throw in the contribution of Dr. Sakena Yacoobi of the Afghan Institute of Learning, behind the opening of “schools for girls and women around the nation.”
Paul Wolfowitz, who served as Bush’s deputy defence secretary, is less sentimental in his assessment of the Afghanistan fiasco. To Australia’s Radio National, he was unsparing in calling the victors “a terrorist mob that has been hating the United States for the last 20 years.” They had provided the launching ground for “one of history’s worst attacks on the United States” and were now “going to be running that bit of hostile territory.”
Being in Afghanistan, he asserted, was not costly for the occupiers – at least to the US. It made good sense in preventing it from “once again becoming a haven for terrorists”. For the last year and a half, there had not been a single American death. He chided the simpletons at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs who dared survey Americans with the question, “Would you like to leave [Afghanistan] and get out?” They would have been far better framing it differently: “Do you support withdrawal if it means the country is going to be overrun by the same people who hated us 20 years ago and from where an attack that killed 3,000 Americans took place”.
To talk about “endless wars” was also something to avoid. In a reminder that the US imperial footprint remains global, Wolfowitz drew attention to the fact that Washington was hardly going to withdraw from South Korea, where it was still officially at war with the North. It kept troops in countries it had previously been at war with: Germany and Japan. Americans, he lamented, had not “been told the facts” by their politicians.
Boiled down to its essentials, such a view has little time for Afghans with a country “more or less ungovernable for long periods of time”. (What uncooperative savages.) The Obama administration’s deployment of 100,000 soldiers had been an “overreach” with unclear intention. It was far better to treat Afghanistan as a state to contain with “a limited commitment” of US forces rather than “extending to the idea that Afghanistan would become a latter-day Switzerland.” Ringing the real estate, not advancing the people, mattered.
Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, a caricature of US interventionist policies, never had much time for the withdrawal argument, either. Earlier in August, with the Taliban humming along with speed in capturing a swag of provincial cities, Bolton warned that it was “literally [President Joe] Biden’s last chance to reverse his and Trump’s erroneous withdrawal policy. When the Taliban wins, it compromises the security of all Americans.”
Another voice from the neoconservative stable advocating the need for a continued boot print of US power was Max Boot, who thought it nonsensical to keep US troops in Iraq while withdrawing them from Afghanistan. US forces needed, he wrote in the Irish Independent (July 29) “to stay in both countries to prevent a resurgence of the terrorist threat to the US and its allies.” The “imperative” to prevent both countries from becoming “international terrorist bases” remained, but only one had an adequate military presence to provide insurance. Decent of Boot to show such candour.
The British, long wedded to the idea of empire as gift and necessity, have also piled onto the wagon of stayers, saying less about the merits of protecting Afghan citizens than keeping trouble boxed and localised. “We will run the risk of terrorist entities re-establishing in Afghanistan, to bring harm in Europe and elsewhere,” feared General Sir Richard Barrons. “I think this is a very poor strategic outcome.”
British Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood, a former captain in the Royal Green Jackets, went further by suggesting that plucky Britain best go it alone in the face of foolhardy US withdrawal. “Just because the US chose to depart does not mean we should slavishly follow suit,” he exhorted. “Would it not make sense to stay close to the Afghan people given the importance of this bit of real estate?”
The one who tops all of this off must be former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, always one given to evangelising wars waged in the name of a sinister, tinfoil humanitarianism. As executive of an institute bearing his name (modest to a fault), he railed against a withdrawal executed “in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘forever wars’”. Like Wolfowitz, he dismissed the use of such terms and comparisons, noting the diminishing troop deployment on Afghan soil and the fact that “no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months.”
Despite the withdrawal, Blair suggested that options were available to “the West” which needed some “tangible demonstration” that it was not in “retreat”. A “list of incentives, sanctions and actions” had to be drawn up against the Taliban. In doing so, his motivation was simple: that these turbaned fanatics represented a strategic risk, part of “Radical Islam” that had been “almost 100 years in gestation”.
Far from ditching the prospect for future interventions, the high priest of illegal war is all-embracing of the formula. “Intervention,” he opines, “can take many forms. We need to do it learning the proper lessons of the past 20 years according not to our short-term politics, but our long-term strategic interests.” Be fearful for Afghanistan’s sovereignty, and woe to those lessons.
ISIS has reportedly claimed credit for an explosion near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. As of this writing there are around 90 dead including 13 US military personnel, though to read western mainstream media reports you’d think only US troops died and not scores of Afghans as well.
This was the deadliest attack in a decade on US troops in Afghanistan, which is odd to think about considering how many people the US military has killed during that time; just between January and July of this year the war killed 1,659 civilians. The way the US war machine has shifted to relying more on highly profitable missiles and bombs and unmanned aircraft to avoid the bad PR of flag-draped bodies flying home on jets is making the murder of foreigners a safer profession than working at a convenience store.
Because US military casualties of this size have become more rare despite their being spread throughout the world in nations whose people don’t want them there, news of those 13 deaths is being met with shock and astonishment instead of being regarded as a very normal part of foreign military occupations. People are acting like these were mall cops in Ohio and not military forces overseeing the tail end of a 20-year war overseas, and pundits and politicians are demanding more bombs and more military interventionism in response to people on the other side of the world attacking them in their own country.
It is sickening and enraging to hear that at least 12 U.S. servicemembers have been killed at the hands of terrorists in Kabul. We need to redouble our global efforts to confront these barbarian enemies who want to kill Americans and attack our homeland. My full statement: pic.twitter.com/ydke3F6sZ7
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement calling on the US to “redouble our global efforts” in the war on terror in response to the attack, seizing the opportunity to promote more “we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” nonsense.
“Terrible things happen when terrorists are allowed to operate freely. This murderous attack offers the clearest possible reminder that terrorists will not stop fighting the United States just because our politicians grow tired of fighting them,” McConnell said. “I remain concerned that terrorists worldwide will be emboldened by our retreat, by this attack, and by the establishment of a radical Islamic terror state in Afghanistan. We need to redouble our global efforts to confront these barbarian enemies who want to kill Americans and attack our homeland.”
Yep, yeah, that makes sense Mitch. 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.
What the US actually needs to do is get the absolute fuck out of the entire region and stop creating more and more violent extremists with insane acts of mass military violence for power and profit. The very last institution on earth who should be trying to do something about ISIS is the institution whose actions created ISIS in the first place.
But of course acting in accordance with that self-evident fact is too much to ask of the US government, and Biden has announced that he has ordered his commanders “to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities.”
BREAKING: Pres. Biden says he's ordered his commanders "to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities."
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.
Step 1: Destroy nations, kill millions and displace tens of millions in military interventions for power and profit.
Step 2: Wait for some of those people to hate you and want to fight back.
Step 3: Use their desire to fight back as justification to repeat Step 1.
The “war on terror” is the greatest scam ever invented.
________________
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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the final New Zealand Defence Force evacuation flight from Afghanistan landed back in the United Arab Emirates last night, before the bomb attacks killing at least 12 US soldiers and 60 Afghans at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
One hundred people, including New Zealanders and Australians, were on the flight. It is not yet clear how many of those people are destined for New Zealand.
So far, 276 New Zealand nationals and permanent residents, their families, and other visa holders have been evacuated.
There were no New Zealand Defence Force personnel in Kabul and no New Zealand evacuees at the airport at the time of the explosions.
Ardern described the attacks as “appalling” and said the country’s thoughts were with all of those in Afghanistan who had been killed or injured.
“We strongly condemn what is a despicable attack on many innocent families and individuals who were simply seeking safety from the incredibly difficult and fragile situation in Afghanistan,” she said in a statement.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade remained in close contact with New Zealand citizens and permanent residents in Afghanistan who had previously registered on SafeTravel or otherwise made contact.
‘High threat of terrorist attack’
Yesterday, all those known to have been in Afghanistan were advised by MFAT of the “ongoing and very high threat of terrorist attack” and warned not to go to Hamid Karzai International Airport and to leave the airport if they were nearby.
At this stage, there have been no requests for assistance from New Zealanders or other visa holders in Afghanistan related to the explosion. MFAT are trying to contact all those known to be in the region.
Ardern said the situation at Kabul’s airport had been so difficult for both people trying to get out, and those undertaking the evacuations that there would be no more flights into the city.
Over the course of the mission, the NZDF aircraft was able to undertake three flights out of Kabul and had successfully brought out hundreds of evacuees who are destined for both New Zealand and Australia.
Australia also brought out a number of those destined for New Zealand.
Defence Minister Peeni Henare said as well as those who have already arrived in the country, more people eligible for relocation are in transit. Some are being processed at bases outside Afghanistan, so it is still too early to know the total numbers of people who will be returned to Aotearoa, he said.
Ardern said those who remained were in an incredibly difficult position.
Afghanistan situation “complex, fragile”
“The situation in Afghanistan is incredibly complex and fragile and continues to change rapidly. Our next job is to consider what can be done for those who remain in Afghanistan still. That will not be a quick or easy task,” she said.
She also praised those Defence Force personnel who undertook the mission.
“I want to thank our Defence Force personnel who have worked hard to bring those in need home, by establishing a presence on the ground both at the airport in Kabul, and in the United Arab Emirates alongside other government agencies.”
She also thanked New Zealand’s partners, especially Australia, the US and the United Arab Emirates.
It has not yet been confirmed when NZDF personnel and the C-130 aircraft will arrive back in New Zealand.
Fiji evacuations ABC’s Pacific Beat reports that five Fijian workers have been evacuated from Afghanistan after the Taliban took control of the country, three being flown to Kazhakstan.
One Fiji security contractor said a humanitarian crisis is looming with major challenges ahead for the country.
Former generals and elected officials are flooding the airwaves to demand the US continue its occupation of Afghanistan, without disclosing their ties to the defense companies that have profited handsomely from the war or having to answer for the decisions they made that prolonged the conflict.
Children, adult civilians, and U.S. military personnel were among those reportedly killed or wounded Thursday in a pair of explosions near Kabul’s international airport, the site of a chaotic evacuation effort that the Biden administration is aiming to complete by early next week.
It’s not yet clear who or what caused the blasts, which are believed to have killed dozens of people. Citing the U.S. envoy in Kabul, the Wall Street Journalreported that at least 60 Afghans and four U.S. Marines were killed in the explosions.
U.S. Defense Department Press Secretary John Kirby confirmed that there were at least two explosions, one of which he said was “the result of a complex attack that resulted in a number of U.S. and civilian casualties.”
“We can also confirm at least one other explosion at or near the Baron Hotel, a short distance from [the Kabul airport’s] Abbey Gate,” Kirby wrote on Twitter.
Unnamed U.S. officials told Reuters that at least one of the blasts Thursday was caused by a suicide attack.
The explosions came after the U.S., United Kingdom, and other Western governments warned their citizens earlier Thursday not to travel to the Kabul airport, pointing to “very credible” intelligence indicating a possible attack.
Afghanistan is just breaking my heart. If there was ever proof that the U.S. military was lying to us for decades about “progress”, this is it.
Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement following the deadly blasts that Afghan officials “have warned U.S. troops about possible terrorist groups such as ISIS.”
“The Taliban are committed to the international community and will not allow terrorists to use Afghanistan as a base for their operations,” Mujahid added.
Apparent suicide bombers struck at the Abbey Gate of the Kabul airport in Afghanistan just as evening was settling in, followed by a second bombing at a nearby hotel. The gate itself was not in use — other gates had been prioritized for the swift removal of U.S. personnel — but huge crowds of Afghan civilians were still gathered there, hoping for escape. U.S. intelligence had been warning such an attack was “imminent,” and had advised Americans to stay away from the airport for the time being. Multiple civilians and U.S. Marines were killed in the attack.
Reaction from the “news” media was swift: Here was the “nightmare scenario” for the Biden administration, which is of course solely responsible for the mayhem of this withdrawal, so there. While most agree that leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do, the way President Biden did so has become an ongoing disaster involving bodies raining down from airplanes and now a bombing at the airport.
It has been like this for days now, a relentless drumbeat of finger-pointing by the media, fueled by a parade of generals and politicians who have spent the last 20 years warming up Afghanistan for the calamity it has become.
Yet what has been missing from all the conversation on Afghanistan is the simple truth: WE LOST THE WAR. Almost nobody seems willing or able to speak those four words out loud. The coverage has been shrill and angry, like a family trying to discuss an embarrassing secret without actually naming it. To name it is to make it real, and the reality that WE LOST THE WAR appears to be too overwhelming for the motherboards of many. Not enough RAM to encompass the new program; the old one has been running for so long.
The coverage has been furious in its narrowed scope. Look at this! How embarrassing! We can’t leave anyone behind! Biden must be impeached! Much of this is certainly political opportunism on the part of Republicans — as activist journalist Jeff Tiedrich noted on Twitter, all those voices were silent when Donald Trump bailed on the Kurds while handing bases over to Russia — but there is more to it. For all that has been said, what has been left unsaid looms large: WE LOST THE WAR.
The August 31 withdrawal deadline is a stinging example of the phenomenon. Virtually every face on the television, including scores of influential people who had a hand in crafting this long and dismal failure, is demanding that Biden extend that deadline … but he can’t. For one thing, the bombings today underscore the need for as immediate an escape as possible. However, more than that, if we recognize the fact that WE LOST THE WAR, we are confronted with the fact that we do not get to unilaterally dictate the terms of our exit. The victorious Taliban set that deadline, as all triumphant armies do, and we are not in a good position to break it or demand more time, because WE LOST THE WAR.
This withdrawal is so messy because there is nothing on Earth more vulnerable than an army in retreat, which is precisely what we are, Afghan personnel and all, because WE LOST THE WAR. Biden could certainly have prepared better for this exit, with humanitarian efforts and refugee assistance, but he could not have made it easy, any more than he could turn water into wine.
The arrogance is astounding. WE LOST THE WAR, and yet all these people seem to think we still get to dictate terms to the world because we’re Americans, so there. Losers don’t get to dictate terms — if they’re lucky, they’re allowed to leave with the shirt on their back. We are watching the “mighty” U.S. navigate its second lost war in 20 years, and many are unable to process the fact that the world now gets to dictate terms to us.
Last Monday, CIA Director William Burns met secretly with Abdul Ghani Baradar, de facto leader of the Taliban, to discuss the terms of the U.S. withdrawal. Baradar spent eight years in prison after getting captured during a CIA-run operation, and there he was, leader of a victorious army, sitting across the table from the director of the CIA and holding all the cards. The fact that Biden sent such a high-ranking official is a bright indicator of this nation’s thoroughly humbled estate.
If you’ve ever wondered what Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu felt while seated across from Douglas MacArthur on board the USS Missouri with the ink of surrender drying on the table before them, Director Burns could probably give you a fairly accurate description of those emotions. Baradar’s version was not nearly as stark or ceremonial, but having him at that table with the reins in his hand is an astonishing turn for this “invincible” nation.
If we are not prepared to say WE LOST THE WAR even with the rank fact of it pouring out of every television in America, perhaps we should not be starting wars in the first place. Perhaps we should not be starting wars in the first place, no matter what we are prepared to say.
That, though, is the rub: The TV people, the corporations who own them and the wars that pump up their ratings cannot openly admit defeat. Doing so might make it harder to start the next war, or the last one all over again. This is simply impermissible, and so rolls the wheel.
WE LOST THE WAR. Nothing gets better until we admit this and accept it.
An explosion outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Thursday has resulted in a yet-unknown number of casualties, hitting a highly populated area of the airport where thousands have gathered seeking to flee the country after the Taliban took political control of the country earlier this month.
The U.S. State Department also announced that “four or more U.S. service personnel” are believed to have been among those who were harmed by the blast. It was left unclear what their current status was.
The blast took place at the Abbey Gate, the main entry point to the airport, just after 5 p.m. local time. Early reports of the explosion suggested that it was carried out by at least one suicide bomber who was wearing a vest laden with explosives.
Shortly after his first tweet confirming the explosion at the airport, Kirby confirmed that a second explosion had occurred.
“We can confirm that the explosion at the Abbey Gate was the result of a complex attack that resulted in a number of US & civilian casualties. We can also confirm at least one other explosion at or near the Baron Hotel, a short distance from Abbey Gate,” Kirby wrote.
The hotel is an area of the city where many Americans have gathered in order to coordinate their exit from the country with U.S. officials.
According to reporting from Politico, which cited a U.S. official who was familiar with the attack, the airport bombing was perpetrated by an individual affiliated with ISIS (also known as Daesh).
Hours prior to the first explosion, the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan had warned Americans who were outside the airport waiting to be transported out of the country to leave the area immediately. They cited unspecified security threats, and discouraged travel to the airport.
“This is a dynamic and volatile security situation on the ground…. We take seriously the priority we attach to the safety and security of American citizens,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement regarding the threat.
On a Friday night in southern Yemen in October 2011, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was enjoying dinner with his 17-year-old cousin at an open-air restaurant. He was getting ready to say goodbye to him before heading back to his grandpa’s house in Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa.
Abdulrahman was an American, born in Denver, Colorado, 26 years ago today, August 26. He spent the first seven years of his life in the United States, doing what a lot of other U.S. kids do: watching “The Simpsons,” listening to Snoop Dogg and reading the Harry Potter series.
But on that October night in Yemen,he wouldn’t make it back to Sanaa. While he was at dinner, a drone strike authorized by then-President Barack Obama was carried out. It killed him, his cousin, and several other civilians.
Abdulrahman should have been turning 26 years old today, but instead his future was robbed by the U.S. drone war. His grandfather wrote a plea for answers from the Obama administration in The New York Times in 2013 about the murder of his beloved grandson.
“Local residents told me his body was blown to pieces. They showed me the grave where they buried his remains. I stood over it, asking why my grandchild was dead. Nearly two years later, I still have no answers,” he wrote.
This kind of grief is all too common in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, where most U.S. drone strikes are conducted.
Like so many victims of U.S. drone strikes, Abdulrahman was in “the wrong place at the wrong time.” For the al-Awlaki family, the circumstances around Abdulrahman’s death were incredibly familiar. Just two weeks prior, a U.S. ordered drone strike killed his father, Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen accused of being a part of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
While the drone strike on his father was intentional, questions still surround the Obama administration’s decision to order the drone strike that killed Abdulrahman. In 2017, the Trump administration approved a U.S. raid targeting al-Qaeda in al-Ghayil that killed Abdulrahman’s half-sister, Nawar al-Awlaki. Nawar was 8 years old and also a U.S. citizen.
How can the “war on terror” truly be about the country’s safety when it is directly killing U.S. citizens?
Right before President Obama took office, the CIA launched a drone attack on a funeral in Pakistan that killed 41 people. Drones quickly became the main manifestation of the war on terror during Obama’s time in office. The premise of increased use of drones was to keep U.S. boots off the ground in the Middle East and Africa. With drone technology, the U.S. was able to conduct covert wars in several countries at once.
Three days after he was inaugurated, Obama authorized a drone strike in Pakistan that killed as many as 20 civilians. Even after knowing how deadly drone strikes really were, Obama went on to conduct 10 times more drone strikes than his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Eight years and 540 drone strikes later, the U.S. public will never really know how many civilians were killed during those years. The U.S. military counts many teenage boys as “enemy combatants” instead of civilians.
In 2011, the U.S. military launched Operation Haymaker in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley. Analysts at Bagram Air Force base would track militants’ cellphones, which proved inaccurate at times. Targets were often with their families or near bystanders when spotted by intelligence analysts. In 2015, The Intercept helped leak documents that showed during the period of Operation Haymaker, 90 percent of those killed by drone strikes were not the intended target.
President Donald Trump continued the brutal use of drones in Afghanistan. In November of 2019, he authorized a drone strike on a village in southeastern Afghanistan where local residents said that all the casualties that day were civilians.
“They keep saying that they are killing terrorists. But that’s not true. Farmers, shepherds and women are not terrorists. One of the victims, Naqib Jan, was a 2-year-old child,” said Islam Khan, a resident of the province that was attacked that day.
Americans were told that “terrorists” don’t respect U.S. rights and values. But what are the nation’s rights and values? The highest law of the land would suggest due process and liberty, something drone strikes and the PATRIOT Act do everything to undermine. Three U.S. citizens in a single family, two of whom were children, were executed without charges, evidence or a trial. The U.S. Supreme Court would not even uphold Anwar al-Awlaki’s right to due process because it was an issue of national security that the Supreme Court felt it had no jurisdiction over. Drone strikes that kill people, even suspected terrorists, are in violation of not only our own laws but international law as well. U.S. citizen or not, the U.S. military cannot continue to act as judge, jury and executioner for people.
Drone strikes and military occupation during the war on terror have been devastating, taking many more lives than the public will ever really be able to know. The only way to make a safer world is the abandonment of war on terror policies like drone strikes and forever wars. After 20 years of unimaginable brutality, the U.S. must be held accountable for the killing of Abdulrahman, Nawar, and countless other civilians across Asia and Africa.
Twenty years since the war on terror began, it has only created more enemies, instability and suffering. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Afghanistan. For two decades the U.S. occupied and bombed Afghanistan under the guise of fighting terrorism. Between January 2004 and February 2020, the U.S. conducted over 13,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan. Thousands of Afghan civilians have been mercilessly killed and millions displaced by the U.S. occupation and continual drone strikes. The group the U.S. spent decades and trillions of dollars fighting has now taken over the country. The U.S. has nothing to show for its occupation of Afghanistan but blood, and lots of it.
(@DefenceHQ) 
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