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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Debacle in Afghanistan</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Tariq Ali -
August 16, 2021<br>
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<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/opinion/biden-afghanistan-taliban.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">NYT</a>, Gideon Rachman in
the <a
href="https://www.ft.com/content/71629b28-f730-431a-b8da-a2d45387a0c2"
moz-do-not-send="true">FT</a> – 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. </p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning"
moz-do-not-send="true">billions</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-taliban-infiltration-idUSTRE82208H20120303"
moz-do-not-send="true">infiltrated</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47861444"
moz-do-not-send="true">90%</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://nypost.com/2016/11/14/us-troops-may-have-committed-war-crimes-in-afghanistan-icc/"
moz-do-not-send="true">‘terror suspects’</a>, raped
Afghan <a
href="http://peacewomen.org/content/afghanistan-afghan-girl-raped-killed-us-troops"
moz-do-not-send="true">civilians</a> and
green-lighted child abuse by <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">allied militias</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/"
moz-do-not-send="true">Defense Department</a>. Afghan
casualty figures are difficult to calculate, since
‘enemy deaths’ that include civilians are not counted.
Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives <a
href="http://www.comw.org/pda/0201strangevic.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">estimated</a> 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 <a
href="https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f"
moz-do-not-send="true">reporting</a> 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.</p>
<p>In 2019, the<em> Washington Post</em> published a
2,000-page internal report commissioned by the US
federal government to anatomise the failures of its
longest war: ‘<a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/"
moz-do-not-send="true">The Afghanistan Papers</a>’.
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’.</p>
<p>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?”’.
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’</p>
<p>All this was an open secret in the chanceries and
defence ministries of NATO Europe. In October 2014,
the British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/26/uk-troops-camp-bastion-afghan-forces-13-years-helmand"
moz-do-not-send="true">admitted</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-summit-britain-afghanistan-idUSKBN1K02WM"
moz-do-not-send="true">redeployed</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/nick-carter-taliban-qatar-kabul-british-b950402.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">suggesting</a> 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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>Read on: Tariq Ali, <a
href="https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii50/articles/tariq-ali-afghanistan-mirage-of-the-good-war"
moz-do-not-send="true">‘Mirage of the Good War’</a>,
NLR 50. </em><em></em></p>
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