[News] Debacle in Afghanistan

[Anti-Imperialist News]

newleftreview.org 
<https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/debacle-in-afghanistan>


  Debacle in Afghanistan

Tariq Ali - August 16, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The fall of Kabul to the Taliban on 15 August 2021 is a major political 
and ideological defeat for the American Empire. The crowded helicopters 
carrying US Embassy staff to Kabul airport were startlingly reminiscent 
of the scenes in Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City – in April 1975. The 
speed with which Taliban forces stormed the country was astonishing; 
their strategic acumen remarkable. A week-long offensive ended 
triumphantly in Kabul. The 300,000-strong Afghan army crumbled. Many 
refused to fight. In fact, thousands of them went over to the Taliban, 
who immediately demanded the unconditional surrender of the puppet 
government. President Ashraf Ghani, a favourite of the US media, fled 
the country and sought refuge in Oman. The flag of the revived Emirate 
is now fluttering over his Presidential palace. In some respects, the 
closest analogy is not Saigon but nineteenth-century Sudan, when the 
forces of the Mahdi swept into Khartoum and martyred General Gordon. 
William Morris celebrated the Mahdi’s victory as a setback for the 
British Empire. Yet while the Sudanese insurgents killed an entire 
garrison, Kabul changed hands with little bloodshed. The Taliban did not 
even attempt to take the US embassy, let alone target American personnel.

The twentieth anniversary of the ‘War on Terror’ thus ended in 
predictable and predicted defeat for the US, NATO and others who 
clambered on the bandwagon. However one regards the Taliban’s policies – 
I have been a stern critic for many years – their achievement cannot be 
denied. In a period when the US has wrecked one Arab country after 
another, no resistance that could challenge the occupiers ever emerged. 
This defeat may well be a turning point. That is why European 
politicians are whinging. They backed the US unconditionally in 
Afghanistan, and they too have suffered a humiliation – none more so 
than Britain.

Biden was left with no choice. The United States had announced it would 
withdraw from Afghanistan in September 2021 without fulfilling any of 
its ‘liberationist’ aims: freedom and democracy, equal rights for women, 
and the destruction of the Taliban. Though it may be undefeated 
militarily, the tears being shed by embittered liberals confirm the 
deeper extent of its loss. Most of them – Frederick Kagan in the NYT 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/opinion/biden-afghanistan-taliban.html>, 
Gideon Rachman in the FT 
<https://www.ft.com/content/71629b28-f730-431a-b8da-a2d45387a0c2> – 
believe that the drawdown should have been delayed to keep the Taliban 
at bay. But Biden was simply ratifying the peace process initiated by 
Trump, with Pentagon backing, which saw an agreement reached in February 
2020 in the presence of the US, Taliban, India, China and Pakistan. The 
American security establishment knew that the invasion had failed: the 
Taliban could not be subdued no matter how long they stayed. The notion 
that Biden’s hasty withdrawal has somehow strengthened the militants is 
poppycock.

The fact is that over twenty years, the US has failed to build anything 
that might redeem its mission. The brilliantly lit Green Zone was always 
surrounded by a darkness that the Zoners could not fathom. In one of the 
poorest countries of the world, billions 
<https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning> 
were spent annually on air-conditioning the barracks that housed US 
soldiers and officers, while food and clothing were regularly flown in 
from bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It was hardly a surprise 
that a huge slum grew on the fringes of Kabul, as the poor assembled to 
search for pickings in dustbins. The low wages paid to Afghan security 
services could not convince them to fight against their countrymen. The 
army, built up over two decades, had been infiltrated 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-taliban-infiltration-idUSTRE82208H20120303> 
at an early stage by Taliban supporters, who received free training in 
the use of modern military equipment and acted as spies for the Afghan 
resistance.

This was the miserable reality of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Though 
credit where credit is due: the country has witnessed a huge rise in 
exports. During the Taliban years, opium production was strictly 
monitored. Since the US invasion it has increased dramatically, and now 
accounts for 90% <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47861444> 
of the global heroin market – making one wonder whether this protracted 
conflict should be seen, partially at least, as a new opium war. 
Trillions have been made in profits and shared between the Afghan 
sectors that serviced the occupation. Western officers were handsomely 
paid off to enable the trade. One in ten young Afghans are now opium 
addicts. Figures for NATO forces are unavailable.

As for the status of women, nothing much has changed. There has been 
little social progress outside the NGO-infested Green Zone. One of the 
country’s leading feminists in exile remarked that Afghan women had 
three enemies: the Western occupation, the Taliban and the Northern 
Alliance. With the departure of the United States, she said, they will 
have two. (At the time of writing this can perhaps be amended to one, as 
the Taliban’s advances in the north saw off key factions of the Alliance 
before Kabul was captured). Despite repeated requests from journalists 
and campaigners, no reliable figures have been released on the sex-work 
industry that grew to service the occupying armies. Nor are there 
credible rape statistics – although US soldiers frequently used sexual 
violence against ‘terror suspects’ 
<https://nypost.com/2016/11/14/us-troops-may-have-committed-war-crimes-in-afghanistan-icc/>, 
raped Afghan civilians 
<http://peacewomen.org/content/afghanistan-afghan-girl-raped-killed-us-troops> 
and green-lighted child abuse by allied militias 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html>. 
During the Yugoslav civil war, prostitution multiplied and the region 
became a centre for sex trafficking. UN involvement in this profitable 
business was well-documented. In Afghanistan, the full details are yet 
to emerge.

Over 775,000 US troops have fought in Afghanistan since 2001. Of those, 
2,448 were killed, along with almost 4,000 US contractors. Approximately 
20,589 were wounded in action according to the Defense Department 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/>. Afghan 
casualty figures are difficult to calculate, since ‘enemy deaths’ that 
include civilians are not counted. Carl Conetta of the Project on 
Defense Alternatives estimated 
<http://www.comw.org/pda/0201strangevic.html> that at least 4,200–4,500 
civilians were killed by mid-January 2002 as a consequence the US 
assault, both directly as casualties of the aerial bombing campaign and 
indirectly in the humanitarian crisis that ensued. By 2021, the 
Associated Press were reporting 
<https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f> 
that 47,245 civilians had perished because of the occupation. Afghan 
civil rights activists gave a higher total, insisting that 100,000 
Afghans (many of them non-combatants) had died, and three times that 
number had been wounded.

In 2019, the/Washington Post/ published a 2,000-page internal report 
commissioned by the US federal government to anatomise the failures of 
its longest war: ‘The Afghanistan Papers 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/>’. 
It was based on a series of interviews with US Generals (retired and 
serving), political advisers, diplomats, aid workers and so on. Their 
combined assessment was damning. General Douglas Lute, the ‘Afghan war 
czar’ under Bush and Obama, confessed that ‘We were devoid of a 
fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were 
doing…We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we’re undertaking…If 
the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction.’ Another 
witness, Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy Seal and a White House staffer 
under Bush and Obama, highlighted the vast waste of resources: ‘What did 
we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion? … After 
the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing 
in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.’ 
He could have added: ‘And we still lost’.

Who was the enemy? The Taliban, Pakistan, all Afghans? A long-serving US 
soldier was convinced that at least one-third of Afghan police were 
addicted to drugs and another sizeable chunk were Taliban supporters. 
This posed a major problem for US soldiers, as an unnamed Special Forces 
honcho testified in 2017: ‘They thought I was going to come to them with 
a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live…It took several 
conversations for them to understand that I did not have that 
information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: “But who are 
the bad guys, where are they?”’.

Donald Rumsfeld expressed the same sentiment back in 2003. ‘I have no 
visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq’, he wrote. 
‘I read all the intel from the community, and it sounds as though we 
know a great deal, but in fact, when you push at it, you find out we 
haven’t got anything that is actionable. We are woefully deficient in 
human intelligence.’ The inability to distinguish between a friend and 
an enemy is a serious issue – not just on a Schmittean level, but on a 
practical one. If you can’t tell the difference between allies and 
adversaries after an IED attack in a crowded city market, you respond by 
lashing out at everyone, and create more enemies in the process.

Colonel Christopher Kolenda, an adviser to three serving Generals, 
pointed to another problem with the US mission. Corruption was rampant 
from the beginning, he said; the Karzai government was ‘self-organised 
into a kleptocracy.’ That undermined the post-2002 strategy of building 
a state that could outlast the occupation. ‘Petty corruption is like 
skin cancer, there are ways to deal with it and you’ll probably be just 
fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher level, is like colon 
cancer; it’s worse, but if you catch it in time, you’re probably okay. 
Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.’ Of course, the 
Pakistani state – where kleptocracy is embedded at every level – has 
survived for decades. But things weren’t so easy in Afghanistan, where 
nation-building efforts were led by an occupying army and the central 
government had scant popular support.

What of the fake reports that the Taliban were routed, never to return? 
A senior figure in the National Security Council reflected on the lies 
broadcast by his colleagues: ‘It was their explanations. For example, 
[Taliban] attacks are getting worse? “That’s because there are more 
targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are a false indicator of 
instability.” Then, three months later, attacks are still getting worse? 
“It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s actually an 
indicator that we’re winning”…And this went on and on for two reasons, 
to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops 
and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would 
cause the country to deteriorate.’

All this was an open secret in the chanceries and defence ministries of 
NATO Europe. In October 2014, the British Defence Secretary Michael 
Fallon admitted 
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/26/uk-troops-camp-bastion-afghan-forces-13-years-helmand> 
that ‘Mistakes were made militarily, mistakes were made by the 
politicians at the time and this goes back 10, 13 years…We’re not going 
to send combat troops back into Afghanistan, under any circumstances.’ 
Four years later, Prime Minister Theresa May redeployed 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-summit-britain-afghanistan-idUSKBN1K02WM> 
British troops to Afghanistan, doubling its fighters ‘to help tackle the 
fragile security situation’. Now the UK media is echoing the Foreign 
Office and criticising Biden for having made the wrong move at the wrong 
time, with the head of the British armed forces Sir Nick Carter 
suggesting 
<https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/nick-carter-taliban-qatar-kabul-british-b950402.html> 
a new invasion might be necessary. Tory backbenchers, colonial 
nostalgists, stooge-journalists and Blair-toadies are lining up to call 
for a permanent British presence in the war-torn state.

What’s astonishing is that neither General Carter nor his relays appear 
to have acknowledged the scale of the crisis confronted by the US war 
machine, as set out in ‘The Afghanistan Papers’. While American military 
planners have slowly woken up to reality, their British counterparts 
still cling to a fantasy image of Afghanistan. Some argue that the 
withdrawal will put Europe’s security at risk, as al-Qaeda regroups 
under the new Islamic Emirate. But these forecasts are disingenuous. The 
US and UK have spent years arming and assisting al-Qaeda in Syria, as 
they did in Bosnia and in Libya. Such fearmongering can only function in 
a swamp of ignorance. For the British public, at least, it does not seem 
to have cut through. History sometimes presses urgent truths on a 
country through a vivid demonstration of facts or an exposure of elites. 
The current withdrawal is likely to be one such moment. Britons, already 
hostile to the War on Terror, could harden in their opposition to future 
military conquests.

What does the future hold? Replicating the model developed for Iraq and 
Syria, the US has announced a permanent special military unit, staffed 
by 2,500 troops, to be stationed at a Kuwaiti base, ready to fly to 
Afghanistan and bomb, kill and maim should it become necessary. 
Meanwhile, a high-powered Taliban delegation visited China last July, 
pledging that their country would never again be used as a launch pad 
for attacks on other states. Cordial discussions were held with the 
Chinese Foreign Minister, reportedly covering trade and economic ties. 
The summit recalled similar meetings between Afghan mujahideen and 
Western leaders during the 1980s: the former appearing with their 
Wahhabi costumes and regulation beard-cuts against the spectacular 
backdrop of the White House or 10 Downing Street. But now, with NATO in 
retreat, the key players are China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan (which has 
undoubtedly provided strategic assistance to the Taliban, and for whom 
this is a huge politico-military triumph). None of them wants a new 
civil war, in polar contrast to the US and its allies after the Soviet 
withdrawal. China’s close relations with Tehran and Moscow might enable 
it to work towards securing some fragile peace for the citizens of this 
traumatised country, aided by continuing Russian influence in the north.

Much emphasis has been placed on the average age in Afghanistan: 18, in 
a population of 40 million. On its own this means nothing. But there is 
hope that young Afghans will strive for a better life after the 
forty-year conflict. For Afghan women the struggle is by no means over, 
even if only a single enemy remains. In Britain and elsewhere, all those 
who want to fight on must shift their focus to the refugees who will 
soon be knocking on NATO’s door. At the very least, refuge is what the 
West owes them: a minor reparation for an unnecessary war.

/Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mirage of the Good War’ 
<https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii50/articles/tariq-ali-afghanistan-mirage-of-the-good-war>, 
NLR 50. ///

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