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.
________________
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.
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.
Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need – new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.
— Rudyard Kipling (1899)
The 2011 UK census recorded that Asian groups together numbered roughly 7% of Britain’s population, Black people 3% and mixed-race 2%, making a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) total of 12%. In various combinations they are the decedents of people who’ve once been owned, colonised, lost their lands, original culture, languages etc, and in modern societies have little or no collective institutional or financial power, to combat their ghettoisation in the lower reaches the UK class system. The reason they are here, subject to western structural racism, is because the Tony Blairs of the 18th and 19th C slaughtered and enslaved their ancestors. Throughout this period of the slavery and racist-imperialist gravy-train – and as Rudyard Kipling’s famous sentiments demonstrate – this oppression was represented as doing indigenous peoples some sort of service or favour.
Elites abandoning the post-war decolonisation consensus in our era, returned to this racist faked foreign policy benevolence, force-feeding the public the narrative, that from intrusive Iraq, Afghanistan wars and elsewhere, ‘America is spreading democracy’. The extent to which America is itself a democracy is up for debate, but this marketing is simply a rehash, of the 19th C ‘Onward march of western civilisation’ expansionist ideology. When asked, Ghandi is reputed to have mocked the notion of western civilisation saying ‘I think it would be a good idea’.
Modern racist-imperialists – prominently Blair, his former ministers and his media enablers – blatantly reuse tropes of the same racist propaganda. As the US project in Afghanistan grinds to a halt and tragedy overtakes the country, this propaganda practice has again gone into overdrive. The BBC and most of the corporate media continue to re-spin the years of western domination of Afghanistan as about, educating its women and children. In light of the new US withdrawal position, this is not just last year’s Orwell-like Ministry of Truth-style propaganda, but also a racist narrative that’s again hundreds of years old. During the period of the 18th/19th C imperialist gravy-train, western conquest was similarly represented as ‘civilising the primitive savage’ and justified by narratives of supposedly ‘teaching the ‘w*gs/ darkies Christianity’. Obscuring the slurs of implied ethnic primitivism from modern media presentation, hardly changes the truth of the material and ideological dynamic.
The ‘educating Afghan women and children’ narrative would, as public discourse, be treated with the shocked incredulity it deserves, were indigenous Afghan casualties, from western conquest and occupation, not as a editorial agenda frequently media played down, effaced and censored from representation, No matter how many Afghan mothers protest the western killing of their children, this phenomenon has been mainly absented from prominence in news agendas.
When the UK Times unusually broke ranks reporting a 2009 US atrocity, it was left to campaigning scrutiny site Media Lens to follow up in 2010, writing… “American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed.”
The extent of the problem meant in 2011 after a further nine children died in a NATO air strike, even President Karzai – an ambitious local politician in effect, simply a western satrap – was forced against potential self-interest, to embarrass General Petraeus publicly stating “On behalf of the people of Afghanistan I want you to stop the killings of civilians” and the subsequent apology was “not enough”. The France 24 news site covering Karzai’s statement, also referred to the similar indigenous 65 non-combatants killed during operations in Kunar province’s Ghaziabad district; six civilians killed in neighbouring Nangarhar province, and the hundreds who took to the streets of Kabul protesting the killing of children, all by western forces.
The brutal Taliban shooting of Malala Yousafzai was used as a propaganda boost to the ‘advancing civilisation’ narrative by western media and political elites. But it is perhaps significant that the Taliban who are hardly public relations sophisticates, felt they need only appeal to the lived experience of indigenous people in Afghanistan and the bordering area of Pakistan – in a 2013 response to the surviving Malala, publicly questioning…
if you were shot but [by] Americans in a drone attack, would world have ever heard updates on your medical status? Would you be called ‘daughter of the nation’? Would the media make a fuss about you? Would General Kiyani have come to visit you and would the world media be constantly reporting on you?… Would a Malala day be announced?… More than 300 innocent women and children have been killed in drones attacks but who cares… (numbers unverified).
Even career politician former President Karzai was similarly in line with grassroots experiences, after this year’s withdrawal announcement, telling Russia’s RT (UK) “The US has lost the war in Afghanistan…years ago, when it bombed Afghan homes”. And that this western violence had recruited for the indigenous Afghan Taliban and enabled them. “Things went wrong. They (Taliban) began to re-emerge and the part of the population went with them.”
Given that women and their children are most often the first victims of war, there has never been a significant grassroots pro-imperialism feminist movement. In fact, in contrast to the attempts by pro-war neoliberals to camouflage their atrocities in the clothing of women’s concerns, a generational spanning tradition of anti-war feminists exists, including figures like Jane Adams, Ruth Adler, Vera Brittain, Betty Reardon, and Sylvia Pankhurst who opposed the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. Current media spin about supposedly helping women in Afghanistan also deliberately side-lines significant figures like CodePink’s Medea Benjamin who recently commented…“A shout out to all who joined CODEPINK and other peace groups to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan. From Bush to Obama, we called for our troops to come home. Now we have to stop the military-industrial complex from dragging us into new wars.”
Another issue is can altruism – particularly with regard to educating indigenous women and children – be remotely believed as a motivation for those responsible for the West’s conquest of Afghanistan? Education has been comodified in George W. Bush’s America, and resulting student debt is at record levels. Similarly, in contradiction to previous UK Labour Party traditions, the governments comprising PM Tony Blair, Chancellor Gordon Brown and their cabinets abolished the mandatory student support grant and even introduced fees for what had previously been free education. Consequently, the marketing of the state education policies of Blair et al were frequently parodied by Party grassroots supporters as instead ‘Exploitation, Exploitation, Exploitation’. Blair’s New Labour cuts to lone parent benefits – primarily harming single mothers and their children – is frequently cited as the moment Labour’s traditional support realised they had been betrayed by neoliberal entryism. Would Britain’s neoliberal political elite attacking domestic lone mothers and working-class opportunities, really expend financial resources just to help Afghan women and their children?
Historian David Stannard has documented 100 million dead indigenous people of the Americas as victims of the largest holocaust in human history, occurring as a result of the overall conquest of the continent. For its part the US currently has a population of 331+ million people. There are only 6+ million Native Americans left as part of this population, whose life chances are largely limited by the constraints of the Reservation system. Native Americans are practically un-findable, excluded, in most US cities, and invisible on film and TV. If President George W Bush wanted to help indigenous people, he could have started at home.
If Bush simply wanted to ‘do good’, given former manufacturing city powerhouses like Detroit are wastelands, suffering from the export of US manufacturing jobs to global sweatshop economies, he could have fought poverty and the resulting homelessness crisis. Perhaps most significantly he could have tackled the economic underpinnings of the ongoing post-19th C Black human rights crisis. Are then we really supposed to believe his US conquest of Afghanistan was about some sort of ‘white man’s burden’ altruism?
In contradiction to the western white man’s burden narrative, both Bush and Blair presided over torture programs victimising Muslim people-of-colour. One victim of the UK Blair torture regime – Fatima Boudchar – was actually pregnant when kidnapped along with her husband for rendition. In Afghanistan torture was carried out at Bagram which corporate news outlets largely misrepresent as simply an airbase. Most of the news outlets now pretending to be outraged by human rights concerns under the new Taliban, spun western torture under the entirely new invented term ‘water boarding’ as if it were akin to harmless surfing. For decades prior to this it was simply known as a Nazi torture technique. Not particularly a secret given it was represented even in popular film culture. In Battle of the V1 (1959), a Polish female partisan subjected to Nazi water torture dies after her heart gives out. In Circle of Deception (1960), it’s features, similarly used on a Canadian officer played by Bradford Dillman. Yet, when the victims are simply Muslim people-of-colour, the status of the torture technique suddenly changes.
So what are the real incentives behind the US-led conquest of Afghanistan? On 9/11 the Pentagon and Twin Towers were attacked by 15 violent Sunni Whabbist Saudi Arabians and four other Muslims. It was suggested that Saudi Whabbists had used the Afghanistan wilderness as a training ground. The extent of cultural collusion between the Pashton Afghan Taliban and Whabbist Saudi Arabs is often disputed. In any case Osama Bin Laden was found in neighbouring Pakistan. The question is if you want to combat violent Saudi Arabian Whabbists, why not stop their export and go to source – Saudi Arabia itself? Saudi Arabia is not only the source of the 9/11 attackers but its appalling human rights on the oppression of women and judicial punishment arguably exceeds that of pre-invasion Afghanistan. In fact, since 9/11 the US instead of dealing Saudi Arabia which coincidentally is also its long term regional ally and oil supplier, has attacked or militarily threatened numerous countries that either have nothing to do with the country, or even in ethnic terms have an adversarial relationship to the Saudis – among these predominantly Shia Iraq, Syria, Iran and Berber Libya.
The approach Julian Assange and Wikileaks took to the issue in 2011 was to follow the money, and consequently put some flesh on the notion of a ‘Forever War’ that President Biden is currently citing in justifying US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.
What Assange and Wikileaks are alluding to is a form of ‘Military Keynesianism’. Keynesian economics originated as a method of circumventing the dictatorship of the marketplace, for societies to instead allocate value to things deemed socially functional – sometimes this is augmented by printing money to maintain particular activities. It was supposed to help society’s poor and working-class. In our era it has been a way of redirecting money to the corporate rich – here particularly the military industries. The money printing supporting this – like so many things – has been relabelled, and now termed ‘Quantitative Easing’, but condemned as Welfare or Socialism for the Rich by working-class activists.
This is not the end of the incentives Afghanistan offers. The corporate media are now suggesting the indigenous Afghan Taliban might be motivated by the country’s wealth in Lithium – vital for cell phone products – and Copper deposits. Strange in two decades of coverage, it has never been suggested this was a motivation for the US to go halfway around the world.
It is also worth looking at how Afghanistan fits into the entire Neo-Con agenda. Globalised capitalism is very good at internalising its profits, while externalising its costs onto the general public and society at large. Economically, globalised capitalism doesn’t’ actually work unless subsidised by unfeasible levels of fossil fuel supply at therefore unfeasible low cost levels. The general public has to bear the social cost, the environmental cost, the cost of wars for oil and the potential national security cost of not having localised manufacturing production.
In keeping with this and in contrast to any genuine post-9/11 agenda, US Neo-Con wars have predominantly had two functions – attacking oil rich and/or Russian allied nations. It only takes a casual look at the regional map to show that a US military presence in Afghanistan provides a useful jumping off point for a war or simple military intimidation of Iran. It also gives access to gas powerhouse Turkmenistan and potentially moves America’s military ever closer to Russia’s borders. Predictably, despite Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, at no time during the US-led occupation did the corporate media query the military’s relationship to the country’s borders in the manner that they are doing now the indigenous Taliban are in charge.
Fuel prices are close to record highs, something that is regarded as a detriment to global trade. As Biden announced his intention to go through with the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, OPEC said they were willing to increase global supply. Iran seeing the knife about to taken from its throat seemed believe they were about to be let back into the global oil market, and boasted of being able to boost production. Israel contrived a dispute with Iran over a tanker, apparently believing that this might have a negative effect on any potential ongoing US/Iran negotiations, designed to bring the country in from the cold.
If this conjunction plays-out the way it appears, then Biden ironically for equally capitalist materialistic and environmental hazardous reasons, is going to be the first prominent Democrat in decades, to open up clear blue water between himself and the Republican pro-war Neo-Con agenda, but at least hopefully we will be avoiding attacks on Iran and other future wars.
In the meantime those like Tony Blair who have hitched their careers to the Neo-Con imperialist wagon train will continue to impotently stamp their rhetorical feet, while demanding that their ridiculous white saviour narrative be believed. While aided and abetted by the BBC and corporate media, seemingly unaware they are doing last year’s Ministry of Truth propaganda, and repeating century old racisms.
Afterword:
In reaction to Tony Blair’s latest media temper tantrum, Peter Galbraith, former UN deputy special representative for Afghanistan, said:
In terms of what was imbecilic, frankly it was the strategy that was followed for 20 years, which was to try to build a highly centralised state in a country that was as diverse – geographically and ethnically – as Afghanistan, and to engage in a counterinsurgency strategy without a local partner and the local partner was corrupt, ineffective, illegitimate.
Athens calls for a united response, as refugees already in Lesbos hope their asylum claims will now be reconsidered
Greek officials have said that Greece will not become a “gateway” to Europe for Afghan asylum seekers and have called for a united response to predictions of an increase in refugee arrivals to the country.
Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotaki, has spoken to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, about the developing situation in Afghanistan this week. Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi last week said: “We cannot have millions of people leaving Afghanistan and coming to the European Union … and certainly not through Greece.” The country has just completed a 25-mile (40km) wall along its land border with Turkey and installed an automated surveillance system with cameras, radars and drones.
In this this week’s episode of A View from Afar today, Selwyn Manning and Paul Buchanan are joined by Asia Pacific Report editor Dr David Robie to examine instability in the Pacific – specifically to identify what is going on in New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa.
This is the second part of a two-part Pacific special.
In the second half, Buchanan and Manning analyse the latest developments on Afghanistan and consider whether the humiliating withdrawal of the US suggests an end to liberal internationalism.
Specifically the first half of this episode looks at:
New Caledonia where there will be a third and final referendum on Kanaky independence;
Samoa where there has been a new government installed — the first in four decades — but only after the old guard attempted to resist democratic change, a move that has caused a constitutional crisis; and
Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama has had a new addition to his political headaches — the question of how Fiji gets its NGO and aid workers out of Afghanistan.
Selwyn Manning, David Robie and Paul Buchanan discuss governance and security issues in the Pacific on A View From Afar today. Image: Screenshot APR
In the second half of this episode Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning dig deep into the latest from Afghanistan.
The deadline for Western personnel to have withdrawn from Afghanistan is looming. The Taliban leadership states it will not extend the negotiated deadline of August 31, and US President Joe Biden insists that the US will not request nor assert an extension.
But Biden has instructed his military leaders to prepare for a contingency plan.
What does this humiliating withdrawal indicate to the world?
Is this the realisation of a diminishing United States, a superpower in decline?
Can the US reassert itself as the world’s policeman, or does Afghanistan confirm the US is in retreat and signal an end of liberal internationalism?
Selwyn Manning, Paul Buchanan and Charlotte Bellis of Al Jazeera discussing Afghanistan on A View From Afar today. Image: Screenshot APR
Erik Prince, founder of the infamous defense contracting firm Blackwater, is reportedly charging $6,500 for a seat on a charter plane leaving Kabul, Afghanistan, as Afghan citizens are clamoring to leave the country amid a mounting humanitarian crisis.
Prince told the Wall Street Journal about his evident scheme to profit off the chaos and desperation in an article published Wednesday. It’s unclear whether or not the disgraced defense contractor is actually able to contribute to the evacuation efforts in this way.
Even as tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people rush to leave Afghanistan, however, the WSJ reports that many charter flights are leaving the country with hundreds of vacant seats. Afghans, risking being killed en route to the airport, are facing roadblocks and checkpoints put up by the Taliban, who have also made driving out of the country into Pakistan inaccessible and dangerous.
Prince has a storied and checkered career, defined partly by his drive to privatize and profit from the Afghanistan war. His latest stunt, then, is relatively unsurprising for anyone familiar with his past.
Prince’s company, Blackwater, is perhaps best known for a 2007 massacre in Baghdad in which 17 people were killed. The company was tasked with providing private security for the government when Blackwater guards apparently began shooting at innocent people attempting to flee Nisour square.
An investigation at the federal level found Blackwater responsible for the massacre. In 2014, one Blackwater guard was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, while three others were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 30 years in prison. However, the latter sentence was later halved by a federal appeals court.
Controversially, however, in a particularly shocking move, former President Donald Trump, who appointed Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos as his education secretary, pardoned the former guards just before he left office. He was slammed by critics for the pardon and a United Nations human rights expert said that it violated international law.
Trump also kept a close relationship with Prince who acted as an unofficial adviser to Trump after the defense contractor had been excoriated by the media for being “an infamous symbol of U.S. foreign policy hubris,” as The Intercept wrote, for the Blackwater incident. In 2017, shortly before Trump took office, Prince had met with a close ally of Vladimir Putin to discuss conflicts in the Middle East — another incident that created headlines.
As a Trump ally, Prince also dabbled in domestic politics. Last year, an explosive report found that he had helped recruit spies to infiltrate at least one Democratic campaign and other organizations that were viewed as a threat to Trump’s power.
As a shady Republican operative, Prince’s move to make evacuating Kabul perhaps prohibitively expensive is especially ironic considering the Republican Party’s stance on the Afghanistan withdrawal. The GOP has capitalized on President Joe Biden’s chaotic evacuation of the country, politicizing the issue even though they were fully supportive of withdrawing the troops on a much shorter timeline while Trump was president.
Biden has set an August 31 deadline to withdraw all American troops from the country, which he says the administration is on track to meet. He has also said that the U.S. will be helping refugees enter the country, but that they will be thoroughly vetted. The administration is pledging to resettle 50,000 refugees, though progressive critics have said that that’s not nearly enough.
Refugee advocates are urging Biden to extend the deadline until all Afghan allies who aided the U.S. during the 20-year war are evacuated. The president has only doubled down on the deadline, however, and has said relatively little about refugee relocation.
The Coalition is finessing its obligations to the most desperate people on earth, calculating it will help keep them in power
The sight of Peter Dutton’s eyes staring down the camera the other night warning that Afghans fleeing the Taliban posed unknown dangers to Australia showed the Tampa times aren’t 20 years in the past. They are now.
What happened then is happening today as our planes lumber in and out of Kabul: a Coalition government is finessing its decent obligations to refugees to hold onto the vote of the 15 to 20% of the electorate most fearful of race, the constituency the Coalition wants to stay in power.
We look at the situation in Afghanistan, and pressure on Biden to stay longer, with CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, who for years has called for an end to the longest war in U.S. history. “We didn’t want it to end like this, and there should have been better planning in terms of getting people out of the country, but we were very clear we never wanted the U.S. to go in to begin with,” says Benjamin. She also warns the end of the War in Afghanistan will encourage the Biden administration to pour more money and resources into a rivalry with China. “It is a delusional idea that we should be focusing on China as an enemy,” she says.
RAF Bryce Luton arrives in England from Kabul, Afghanistan carrying citizens and aides. British government announced to resettle 5,000 people in the country
According to the Ministry of Defense, 8,458 people have been evacuated since August 13. The evacuation beneficiaries are British citizen, diplomats and Afghan front liners working for British government including those who threatened by Taliban.
According to the British military officer, most people have empty-handed. There is shortage of time and administrative difficulties despite daily flights from Kabul, work is underway to provide essential items to those arriving in UK. Many passengers have been provided medical assistance.
On the other end, Afghanistan is on the red list of UK and those coming from there are being kept in quarantine for ten days.
Despite all the precautions, thorough checking and scrutiny, a person who was placed on no-fly list by UK has also arrived in UK. The list includes people who pose a security risk to the UK or have a criminal record.
The opposition Labor Party has strongly criticized the government over the news.
More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed. When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?
In 2008 and 2009, Rory Fanning walked across the entire United States in memory of Pat Tillman, the former NFL-player-turned-Army Ranger who was killed by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan in 2004. Fanning had served beside Tillman during Fanning’s first tour in Afghanistan. During his second tour, he became a war resister by refusing to carry arms.
Fanning’s first Afghanistan tour was bloody and illuminating; he realized the U.S. invasion and occupation was a human rights catastrophe that made the world a much more dangerous place. During his second tour, Fanning dropped out of the Army as a conscientious objector just days after the U.S. military attempted to cover up the cause of Tillman’s death in a propaganda effort to portray the athlete as a war hero. If not for the ensuing media attention, Fanning says, the military may have simply thrown him in jail.
Instead, Fanning returned to the U.S., where the activist and author penned two books and spent years talking to high school students about the grim reality of serving in the U.S. military — a reality students would never hear about from military recruiters. Now, as the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan comes to a chaotic close, Fanning reflects on 20 years of the war on terror, and how anti-racist activism and the push for free college tuition and universal health care can help stem the tide of U.S. imperialism around the world.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity, you can listen to the full interview at the top of the page.
Mike Ludwig: What has been your initial reaction to the latest news out of Afghanistan?
Rory Fanning: Well, it’s mixed emotions. Obviously, I’m happy to see the United States getting out of Afghanistan; [it] should’ve never been there in the first place. But it’s also horrifying seeing all of the people that we’re leaving behind. My thoughts have been: How can I help get these people out? And not just the people who have facilitated the occupation in Afghanistan, but all Afghans. All Afghans deserve a place to go after the United States occupied their country and helped turn it into a pile of rubble in many ways.
Sure. So, you’d like to see maybe a greater refugee relocation effort or more resources for anyone there who’s seeking help?
Yes. Obviously, this should have been done before we withdrew. There should have been a game plan set up and ready to be implemented or implemented already. But yeah, everybody who wants to leave Afghanistan should be able to leave Afghanistan and the U.S. has an obligation to take care of each and every one of those individuals.
Do you want to just go back a little bit and talk about some of your experience there, maybe some of the people you met and why, when you look at the current situation, you think it’s so important for us to be supportive — not just of people who facilitated the occupation, but anyone who feels perhaps threatened by the Taliban?
The United States has been meddling with Afghanistan for the past 40 years, if not more years. And we’ve brought in warlords who are otherwise out of the country, to basically help carry out the U.S. mission, which was not about freedom and democracy or even nation-building, but rather a counterterrorism effort.
And I saw firsthand that Afghanistan is probably one of the poorest countries on the planet. And so, you see this occupying force coming in with suitcases full of money, saying, “identify a member of the Taliban,” and so people who have no money would say, “Oh there, there’s a member of the Taliban right over there.” And we’d fly in and land in their front yard with night vision on and take out a military-age male, put a bag over their heads and take them off to a place like Guantanamo or the like. We later find out that the person that we had taken wasn’t a member of the Taliban or wasn’t a member of an extremist organization, to use the parlance of the U.S. government, but rather just someone who owed his landlord some money. And the landlord saw the U.S. military coming in with bags full of cash as an opportunity to not only get paid, but also get rid of a problem tenant…. So often we were little more than pawns in village disputes.
Or we’d have rockets land in our camp, and we didn’t necessarily see where they came from specifically. So, we’d call in, you know, a 500-pound bomb airstrike on a village and there would be mass casualties. And we know now that more than 80 percent of all those who have died since 9/11 in Afghanistan have been innocent civilians.
So, people who couldn’t even point to Manhattan on the map suddenly had a vested interest in learning about the United States and in many ways, getting revenge on the United States for killing their brother, their sister, their mother, their father, their infant child.
I signed for the military hoping to help prevent another 9/11-type attack, and I saw that I was only creating the conditions for more such attacks. The world is a much more dangerous place as a result of our invasion of Afghanistan.
Absolutely. A lot of the counterinsurgency strategy was to win “hearts and minds” on the ground — after, as you said, so much of life had been disrupted by invasion and occupation. Was there a particular time in your service that you said, “I think I’m opposed to this and I want to become a resister?”
Well, I entered the country a few months after the Taliban surrendered in early 2002. I didn’t know that, at the time, our job was essentially to bring the Taliban back into the fight. The surrender wasn’t good enough for the United States. They wanted revenge for 9/11. Politicians back home wanted revenge for 9/11, I think that was part of it.
But I also think it was an opportunity to create this ubiquitous enemy and maintain Cold War-era military budgets, and, you know, maintain control of the region, or at least think [we] were. And so, I went into the country and realized that we had absolutely no understanding of the culture, no understanding of the language. We didn’t really even care who we were targeting in many ways. What was it about? I mean, to even say that I knew what it was about would be kind of a disservice.
I do think [the mission] was in large part to bring the Taliban back into the fight. And I think that’s what we did. And we know that so many members of the Taliban now are people who were victims of bombings, U.S. bombings, or warlords that we brought into the country. And people who have no other options — it’s not like you go work in an office somewhere in Afghanistan — turn to the Taliban as a place to put food on the table in many ways.
I felt like a bully in Afghanistan. Like I said, I wanted to make the world a safer place, but saw that [the U.S. military] was making it more dangerous. And I didn’t really see if there was an attempt to build schools. If there was an attempt to look out for people, particularly in the countryside, or create an infrastructure in Afghanistan where they could have roads. I haven’t seen any of that.
What is the timeframe of your service in Afghanistan and also for becoming a war resister? What did that look like for you?
I went in after [the U.S. had been in Afghanistan for] a few months, I think it was 2002 toward the tail end of that year. I was really overwhelmed by the level of poverty and the destruction that had been left over from the Soviet occupation of the country.
And we were occupying schools. Some guy, you know, some military-age man with his friend walked by and didn’t show the proper level of deference, and we put one guy in one room and the other guy in another room, and the guy sitting by himself would hear a gunshot, and we’d walk in and ask him if there was anything he wanted to tell us. This was just a desperate attempt to glean information, and it was terrorizing the Afghan population.
And, you know, like I said, that the 500-pound bombs, the lack of understanding of culture, which led us into these ridiculous, horrible situations where you’re taking people off to secret prisons, and then just the general sense of feeling like a bully. As I said, this is not making the world a safer place. It’s making the world a more dangerous place.
I decided, after my first tour, that I was going to become a war resister. And they said, “No, you’re coming back with us to Afghanistan.” And I said, okay, well I refuse to hold, carry a weapon. And so, I kind of walked with the donkeys in remote regions of Afghanistan on my second tour for about four months.
Fascinating. Do you have any impressions of the country that you got from that experience? I feel like we don’t hear enough in the media about what life is like in Afghanistan, especially in the rural areas. We hear a lot about drugs. We hear a lot about war, but we don’t hear that much about what life is like.
Like anywhere in the world, I think 99.9 percent of the population are incredible people. Most people are good, no matter where you go in the country, I was really struck by the sense of community that I saw. When you have conversations with people they’re really engaged. There was a lack of insecurity that you see when you’re having a conversation with many Americans, [a] lack of self-consciousness. There was a real presence in my interactions with Afghans. And I was envious of [the] sense of community that they had.
So yeah, my experience with Afghans, at least when we were going into towns, was just one of a kind of appreciation for who they were and their community…. I mean, there was obviously a resistance, but they’re very hospitable in the sense that they’d have dinners waiting for us, and they’d have rice and yeah, maybe it was because of pressure, but maybe it was because of just a general sense of hospitality. I felt like most Afghans that I interacted with were far healthier than the occupying force that had visited their country.
At some point, that second tour where you refused to carry a gun came to an end and you came back to the U.S. — and then did you join the antiwar movement? Were you involved in organizing?
It took me a while to kind of settle into that. I came from a fairly right-wing Catholic family who liked the idea that they had a freedom fighter in the family. And so, when I got back, I kind of kept a lot of it to myself, and I spent about five years working in a cubicle, doing what I didn’t want to do … and realizing that I was kind of a half of a person in this process. And I felt like I had to shake things up and eventually, you know, speak about my experiences.
So, I decided to walk across the United States for the Pat Tillman foundation. Pat and his brother Kevin were two of the only people in the military that supported my decision when I became a war resister. And in large part, I didn’t go to jail because of the way Pat died, because they just wanted me out of the unit. You know, the reason they wanted me out of the military at the time, it was because they were covering up his death. I guess they didn’t want the added pressure of someone who was questioning the mission. I felt like on a lot of levels, I owed Pat something. So, I walked across the United States for his foundation.
You said that the Army was interested in covering up Pat Tillman’s death, so you kind of got a pass, and you were in the same unit?
Yes. In the 2nd Ranger Battalion.
What was the reason they were trying to cover it up? What was the story around his death and why the military was so concerned?
Well, first, they tried to make Pat into the poster boy for the war on terror. If someone could give up a $3.6 million NFL contract to go and serve in the military and defend freedom and democracy, then you can too! And this made Pat obviously very uncomfortable, but this is what the U.S. was trying to do.
And so, when they ended up killing Pat in an act of friendly fire, they wanted to cover it up. They burned his uniform and his diary and covered it all the way up to the highest levels of the Bush administration. At the very least, Donald Rumsfeld knew, most likely George Bush knew about it. And, then it all came out.
It was bad PR for the military, really bad PR, because they had used Pat Tillman as a propaganda point.
Exactly.
So, you walked across the country. I imagine that at this point, you were starting to engage in the antiwar movement. And I remember being an activist in the movement and meeting a lot of veterans, both from Afghanistan and Iraq, who’d either become resisters, or after their tours became antiwar activists. And I fear that a lot of their contributions at the time have now been lost in the media. I’m curious about your experience in the antiwar movement and with other veterans who may have agreed with you and organized with you.
Yeah, well, I mean, even after I finished walking across the country, I was still scared to share my story. And it wasn’t until I kind of retraced my steps via history books and saw all of these war resisters of different kinds along my path that I actually didn’t even know about when I was walking. I walked where Ida B. Wells wrote her anti-lynching papers, where the San Patricio Battalion refused to fight Mexicans in the Mexican-American War, where Dolores Huerta organized. And these were kind of war resisters of a different kind, and if they could do what they did, then I could certainly share my story. And so, once I read about these histories, that motivated me to kind of want to get out and meet other people who felt betrayed by the U.S. military, and there are plenty of them out there.
In addition to all the dissenters, the people who’ve left the military and have spoken out after the fact, according to some estimates there’s as many as 80,000 war resisters, people who refuse to fight after entering the military based on what they saw in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. So, there’s quite a number of people out there, it’s just … there’s not a lot of space for dissenting voices to speak out and do their thing.
I realized that getting into high schools was actually a very important thing. There’s more than 10,000 recruiters stalking the [school] hallways around the country, sharing very little about what is actually happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I wanted to fill in some of those blanks in high schools. So, the Chicago Teacher’s Union gave me a grant to go in and speak to as many high schools as I could, and that was actually very difficult because even with the grant, most people see the military as a positive option for young people, particularly in places like the South and West Side of Chicago, where there are not a ton of options after graduation.
I found a lot of community and comfort in meeting other antiwar veterans.
I’m so glad you brought that up, because my entry into the antiwar movement was in high school. I was a freshman when 9/11 happened and began doing counter-recruiting activism in whatever limited ways I could as a high school student. And I not only met antiwar activists that way, but I met veterans as well. I saw veterans as so crucial to the antiwar movement; their experiences were truth to be told in this country. But I also remember the antiwar movement being very factionalized at the time and not everybody seeming to be on board with veterans, possibly because their politics didn’t quite match up. Did you have any problems like that with the movement itself where you didn’t feel welcome for some reason, because you had participated in the war?
I feel like there was a discomfort around some people in the movement, I think there were certain situations where that was the case. I think people with slightly more sophisticated politics were able to see beyond that someone would sign up for the military and actually look a little deeper as to why they would sign up for the military, given the billion-dollar-a-year-propaganda budget the U.S. military has. You know, just the lack of education in schools when it comes to talking about the history of U.S. imperialism — and also giving people the opportunity to change their minds based on what they saw.
I think it’s important for people to be able to hear the voice, the experience of veterans, particularly those who are considering entering the military. You have people just going in and wagging their fingers, saying, “Don’t join the military. It’s a horrible thing.” You know, that’s one thing. And I should say, there needs to be more of that in high schools — but I think you’re more likely to communicate something to a high school-age person if you’ve actually lived it and say, “This is actually why you should think twice about joining the military. Killing someone for a cause that you don’t understand is the worst thing you could possibly do, it’s maybe better to die yourself than to kill someone for a cause you don’t understand.” And then be able to speak [from] a position of authority in that regard. I think it’s hard to replicate that.
Are there any political messages that you would like to get out, that you would draw from all these experiences … now that it’s been about 10 years since the media has had a serious discussion about Afghanistan?
Well, I signed up thinking the United States was a force for good around the world and actually cared about things like freedom and democracy. I realized that that certainly wasn’t the case, and U.S. imperialism is something that benefits a small percentage of the population at the great expense of everyone else. And then there are certain tools that need to be implemented in order to have enough people sign on — to stock the approximately 800 military bases the United States has around the world.
And I think there are xenophobia and racism … this belief that the United States is superior, and that the mission of the United States, which largely is rooted in white supremacy, is the best alternative — that we need to be the police of the world.
I’ve seen some of the mechanisms that allow for endless wars and trillion-dollar-a-year military budgets, and I’ve also come to see some of the ways that we can fight it without necessarily directly being part of the antiwar movement…. There are other ways that you can fight it, like advocating for free education and free health care. I mean, that’s a major blow to U.S. imperialism — when people aren’t signing up for the military because they don’t have to, because they don’t need to have their college paid for or have health care, so they don’t have to do a job that they don’t want [to be] guaranteed healthcare.
If you really care about climate change, you need to go after the people that are most responsible for it. The U.S. military is one of the greatest polluters on the planet, if not the greatest polluter on the planet.
I’m still wondering the best way to challenge U.S. imperialism. It’s certainly not an easy thing, but I think it’s crucial if we’re going to solve a lot of the problems like free education, free healthcare, building a better sustainable infrastructure in the United States, and I don’t know, fighting climate change.
And also, being an anti-racist is at the core of it. I mean, it is very hard to go convince someone to kill somebody if they are anti-racist. If they see that they have much more in common with ordinary people in Afghanistan or North Korea than they do the people telling them to go and fight those people. So, fighting Islamophobia, fighting anti-Black racism here in the United States, those are all part of the ways that we can challenge U.S. imperialism.
Just because we pulled out of Afghanistan doesn’t mean U.S. imperialism is over. As you mentioned, the U.S. has hundreds of bases all across the world. Do you have any thoughts about the future?
Yeah, well, I mean, [imperialism] walks side by side with capitalism. The U.S. ruling class is constantly looking for new markets to exploit, more resources to steal, and ways to dominate other powers around the world. As long as profit is the main concern of those who are running the show, you can expect the empire to continue to fight and look for those markets and do so in extremely violent ways.
In the American Prospect, there’s a really great article by Rozina Ali about how the law is kind of constantly manipulated, changed, and interpreted in a way that makes endless war lawful — to support things like the drone wars, endless wars, things like Guantanamo Bay. I mean, war should technically adapt to the law, but it’s usually the opposite. So, I think there’s going to be constant attempts to manipulate [the law] and justify drone strikes and secret prisons and 800 military bases around the world. The ruling class will use every trick in the book in order to convince people that what they’re doing is okay. There used to be big debates around military conflicts, you know, particularly in lead up to World War II or World War I, but there is [little] of that debate anymore. It’s whether things are lawful or not, and you can manipulate the law to make everything justified, or allowed. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. And I think we’ll continue to see that.
One of the things that Chelsea Manning showed was how vetted the media is when it comes to covering wars. I think there were seven journalists inside of Iraq, behind “enemy lines,” at the time. And so, people aren’t seeing what’s going on around the world, they don’t know that the United States has had military operations in nearly all of the African countries since 2011 alone.
But I think it’s really important for places like Truthout and other independent outlets to cover this stuff and let people know that they’re still spending a trillion dollars a year on the military, and that trillion dollars a year isn’t going toward the infrastructure, it’s not going toward education. It’s lining the pockets of people who are already rich.
One only has to look at ongoing U.S. sanctions on two-dozen countries to realize that they are a moral catastrophe, especially during the pandemic. From the Balkans to Zimbabwe, the United States is dealing devastating blows to nations reeling from the public health and economic impacts of a relentless Covid-19 outbreak
I made this song for my dear darling Dad as a present for this coming Father’s Day which is held on the first Sunday in September in Australia. The words are his. They come from an impassioned poem he wrote from the depths of his guts when he heard the news that the pointless tragedy that was the US mission in Afghanistan had finally stuttered to an ignominious end.
So this one is for all the boomer rebels who not only lit the spark, they maintain the rage to this day. I love you all. Thank you, sincerely, for your service.
________________________
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.
Since Monday, the international media has focused on one story that has managed to knock Covid from the headlines; the capture of the Afghan capital Kabul by Taliban forces and the subsequent exile of President Ashraf Ghani to the UAE, following a US-Taliban authored withdrawal agreement due to be fully implemented by the end of August when the last remaining US Forces are scheduled to leave the war-torn nation.
Over the past week, emotive images of desperate Afghans clinging to departing US warplanes in a bid to escape the incoming theocratic rule of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan have filled television screens worldwide, and there has been much debate in the Western media about women’s rights under the new regime, the increase in refugees that the situation looks set to create, and the competency of the Biden administration in handling the withdrawal.
Even though Australia has done terrible things, Australians can stand by our friends who have been thriving over the past 20 years in Afghanistan
Force Preparation is a week-long course that every Australian Defence Force (ADF) member, as well as journalists, completed before heading to Afghanistan.
The men and women of the ADF were put through their paces, disarming AK47s, learning how to survive kidnap scenarios and being medically tested.
The collapse of Kabul was certainly inevitable but not because U.S.-trained Afghan forces woke up on the morning of August 15 and were suddenly struck with an overwhelming desire to surrender. In fact, a direct line can be drawn from the present moment back to the United States’ decision two decades ago to prevent the Afghans from deciding their own destiny after the Taliban were ousted.
The tragedy begins at the now infamous 2002 Emergency Loya Jirga in Kabul where three-fourths of delegates voted in favor of bringing King Zahir Shah back from exile to serve as Afghanistan’s interim head of state. The strategy to unify the fractured country around this symbolic figurehead made sense given Afghanistan saw 40 consecutive years of relative peace and stability during the king’s reign before a coup exiled him to Rome in 1973.
The vote that emanated from the jirga, a council of elders then still deemed a sacred vehicle for expressing the will of the Afghan people, astonishingly cut across the country’s deep ethnosectarian and tribal lines. Moreover, the plan reportedly was supported by some senior Pakistani military leaders and even key figures within the just-ousted Taliban movement.
So, hopes were high that the king – supposedly still seen as a beloved figure by most Afghans – could temporarily keep the country together until a legitimate and inclusive political solution was formed.
However, this window of opportunity to unite the country for the first time since the 1970s was slammed shut in a painful twist of historical irony. Back at the jirga meeting in 2002, the very same U.S. envoy who helped negotiate the Doha deal with the Taliban in 2020, strong-armed the king into withdrawing so Washington could install Hamid Karzai as president. In addition, the U.S. handed out ministry posts to warlords for their role in helping to overthrow the Taliban.
Former EU political adviser Lucy Morgan Edwards said she witnessed the incident firsthand and how the United States gave the warlords political legitimacy.
“The US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, sidelined the popular former king and made a Faustian bargain with the warlords to allow them into the meeting,” Edwards wrote in a 2013 piece for The Guardian. “This paved the way for them to hijack the state-building process.”
The move instantaneously transformed Karzai into a Western puppet in the eyes of most Afghans. The Karzai government turned out to be rampantly corrupt and incompetent – and to such an extent that the Taliban soon began to look like an appealing alternative. The Ghani administration, of course, would continue this pattern and, as many predicted, the dysfunction and unabashed graft culminated in the Taliban lightning seizure of power.
U.S. Army War College professor M. Chris Mason, who served as a political officer on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, told this author that the jirga was a stage play rigged by the CIA to “put our man Karzai in office.”
In a piece for The Military Review, the U.S. army’s think tank, he and co-author Professor Thomas Johnson argued that “even a ceremonial monarchy would have provided the critically needed source of traditional legitimacy necessary to stabilize the new government and constitution.”
Instead, the opportunity to save Afghanistan was lost.
“The elimination of the monarchy under the new Afghan constitution was very likely the single greatest mistake made by the United States and the United Nations after 2001 – admittedly a high bar in a full field of contestants,” Mason and Johnson wrote in 2009. “As an unrecoverable strategic error, it is the Afghan equivalent of the CIA-inspired coup against Diem in Vietnam in November 1963.”
One could argue that the U.S. decision to install Karzai against the will of the Afghan people, in addition to empowering warlords, planted the seeds that guaranteed a Taliban comeback.
In fact, in a new report – issued two days after the collapse of Kabul – the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) blasted the United States for “legitimizing” Afghan warlords with political and financial support and underscored the damage rendered by this strategy.
“The United States helped to lay a foundation for continued impunity of malign actors, weak rule of law, and the growth of corruption,” the report, published on August 17, said.
Although Afghanistan’s fate may have been sealed by America’s original sin, the United States in the ensuing two decades only exacerbated the situation. Washington continued to fuel corruption with excessive spending, lack of oversight, and unrealistic timelines, according to SIGAR.
SIGAR chief John Sopko has for years warned that such endemic corruption posed the greatest “existential threat” to the Afghan government – an admonition that now seems quite prescient. And one cannot emphasize enough that the roots of this threat can be directly traced and found in the tragic decisions and actions the United States took in June of 2002, which seem to have been long forgotten by anyone in Washington.
Meanwhile, despite all of this, U.S. President Joe Biden – rather than acknowledging any role the United States might have played in the entire fiasco – has so far chosen to point the finger at the Afghan army’s lack of willingness to fight.
In other words, the United States is blaming Afghan troops for refusing to risk their lives defending a predatory regime the United States helped create in the first place.
(@DefenceHQ) 
_search_luggage_during_an_evacuation_at_Hamid_Karzai_International_Airport,_Kabul,_Afghanistan,_Image_6_of_8.jpg){kind=link}