Ugandan President Takes In Afghan Refugees as the CIA’s Enforcer

Editor’s Note: This has been excerpted from the newsletter of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On Sunday, August 15, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani fled his country for Uzbekistan. He left behind a capital city, Kabul, which had already fallen into the hands of the advancing Taliban forces. Former President Hamid Karzai announced that he had formed a coordination council with Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the National Reconciliation Committee, and jihadi leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Karzai called on the Taliban to be prudent as they entered Kabul’s presidential palace and took charge of the state.

Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, and Hekmatyar have asked for the formation of a national government. This will suit the Taliban, since it would allow them to claim to be an Afghan government rather than a Taliban government. But it is the Taliban and their leader Mullah Baradar that will effectively be in charge of the country, with Karzai-Abdullah Abdullah-Hekmatyar as the window dressing designed to placate opportunistic outside powers.

The entry of the Taliban into Kabul is a major defeat for the United States. A few months after the United States initiated its war against the Taliban in 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced that ‘the Taliban regime is coming to an end’. Twenty years later, the reverse is now evident. But this defeat of the United States – after spending $2.261 trillion and causing at least 241,000 deaths – is cold comfort for the people of Afghanistan, who will now have to contend with the harsh reality of Taliban rule. Since its formation in Pakistan in 1994, nothing progressive can be found in the words and deeds of the Taliban over the course of its nearly thirty-year history. Nor can anything progressive be found in the twenty-year war that the United States prosecuted against the Afghan people.

On 16 April 1967, the Cuban magazine Tricontinental published an article by Che Guevara called ‘Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams: That is Our Watchword’. Guevara argued that the pressure on the Vietnamese people needed to be relieved by guerrilla struggles elsewhere. Eight years later, the United States fled from Vietnam as U.S. officials and their Vietnamese allies boarded helicopters from the roof of the CIA building in Saigon.

The U.S. loss in Vietnam came during a series of defeats for imperialism: Portugal was defeated the year before in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique; workers and students ejected Thailand’s dictatorship, opening up a three-year process that culminated in the student upsurge in 1976; the communists took power in Afghanistan during the Saur Revolution in April 1978; the Iranian people opened up a yearlong process against the U.S.-backed dictator, the Shah of Iran, that led to the revolution of January 1979; the socialist New Jewel Movement conducted a revolution on the small island state of Grenada; in June 1979, the Sandinistas moved in on Managua (Nicaragua) and overthrew the U.S.-backed regime of Anastasio Somoza. These were among the many Saigons, the many defeats of imperialism, and the many victories – one way or the other – of national liberation.

Each of these advances came with a different political tradition and a different tempo. The most powerful mass revolt was in Iran, although it did not result in a socialist dynamic but in a clerical democracy. Each of these faced the wrath of the United States and its allies, who would not allow these experiments – most of them socialist in nature – to germinate. A military dictatorship was encouraged in Thailand in 1976, proxy wars were set in motion in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, and Iraq was paid to invade Iran in September 1980. The United States government attempted by any and every means to deny sovereignty to these countries and to return them to full-scale subordination.

Chaos followed. It came alongside two axes: the debt crisis and proxy wars. After the non-aligned countries passed a New International Economic Order (NIEO) resolution in the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, they found themselves squeezed by the Western-dominated financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department. These institutions drove the non-aligned states into a deep debt crisis; Mexico defaulted on its debt in 1982 and inaugurated the ongoing Third World Debt Crisis. In addition, after the victory of the national liberation forces in the 1970s, a new series of proxy wars and regime change operations were initiated to destabilise the politics of Africa, Asia, and Latin America for two generations.

We have not yet emerged out of the destruction caused by the Western policy of the 1970s.

 

The Western callousness towards Afghanistan defines the nature of the counter-revolution and of liberal interventionism. U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided to put immense resources behind the worst elements in Afghan politics and work with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to destroy the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), which lasted from 1978 to 1992 (renamed the Republic of Afghanistan in 1987).

Years after the fall of the Republic of Afghanistan, I met with Anahita Ratebzad, who was a minister in the first DRA government, to ask her about those early years. ‘We faced severe challenges from both within the country – from those who had a reactionary social view – and from without the country – from our adversaries in the United States and Pakistan’, she said. ‘Months after we came to office in 1978, we knew that our enemies had come together to undermine us and to prevent the arrival of democracy and socialism in Afghanistan’. Ratebzad was joined by other important female leaders such as Sultana Umayd, Suraya, Ruhafza Kamyar, Firouza, Dilara Mark, Professor R. S. Siddiqui, Fawjiyah Shahsawari, Dr. Aziza, Shirin Afzal, and Alamat Tolqun – names long forgotten.

It was Ratebzad who wrote in Kabul New Times (1978) that ‘Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country … Educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention’. The hope of 1978 is now lost.

Pessimism must not be laid at the feet of the Taliban alone, but also of those – such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Pakistan – who funded and supported the Taliban-like theocratic fascists. In the dust of the U.S. war that began in 2001, women like Anahita Ratebzad were pushed under the rug; it suited the United States to see the Afghan women as incapable of helping themselves, and therefore to need U.S. aerial bombardment and U.S. extraordinary rendition to Guantánamo. It also suited the United States to deny its active links to the worst theocrats and misogynists (people such as Hekmatyar, who are no different from the Taliban).

The United States funded the mujahideen, undermined the DRA, drew in the reluctant Soviet intervention across the Amu Darya, and then increased the pressure on both the Soviets and the DRA by making the counter-revolutionary Afghan forces and the Pakistani military dictatorship pawns in a struggle against the USSR. The Soviet withdrawal and the collapse of the DRA led to an even worse scenario with a bloody civil war, out of which the Taliban emerged. The U.S. war against the Taliban ran for twenty years but – despite the superior military technology of the United States – led to the U.S. defeat.

Imagine if the United States had not backed the mujahideen and if the Afghans had been allowed to entertain the possibility of a socialist future. This would have been a struggle with its own zigs and zags, but it would certainly have resulted in something better than what we have now: the return of the Taliban, the flogging of women in public, and the enforcement of the worst social codes. Imagine that.

The defeat of U.S. power does not necessarily come these days with the possibility of the exertion of sovereignty and the advancement of a socialist agenda. Rather, it comes through chaos and suffering. Haiti, like Afghanistan, is part of the detritus of U.S. interventionism, tormented by two U.S. coups, an occupation of its political and economic life, and now by another earthquake. The loss in Afghanistan also reminds us of the U.S. defeat in Iraq (2011); these two countries faced ferocious U.S. military power but would not be subordinated.

All of this elucidates both the wrath of the US war machine, capable of demolishing countries, but also the weakness of U.S. power, unable of fashioning the world in its image. Afghanistan and Iraq built up state projects over hundreds of years. The United States destroyed their states in an afternoon.

Afghanistan’s last left-wing president, Mohammed Najibullah, had tried to build a National Reconciliation Policy in the 1980s. In 1995, he wrote to his family, ‘Afghanistan has multiple governments now, each created by different regional powers. Even Kabul is divided into little kingdoms … unless and until all the actors [regional and global powers] agree to sit at one table, leave their differences aside to reach a genuine consensus on non-interference in Afghanistan and abide to their agreement, the conflict will go on’. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, they captured President Najibullah and killed him outside the UN compound. His daughter, Heela, told me a few days before the Taliban took Kabul about her hopes that her father’s policy would now be adopted.

Karzai’s plea is along this grain. It is unlikely to be genuinely adopted by the Taliban.

What will moderate the Taliban? Perhaps pressure from its neighbours – including China – who have interests at stake in a stable Afghanistan. In late July, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with the Taliban’s Baradar in Tianjin. They agreed that U.S. policy had failed. But the Chinese urged Baradar to be pragmatic: to no longer support terrorism and to integrate Afghanistan into the Belt and Road Initiative. At present, this is the only hope, but even this is a fragile thread.

In July 2020, former minister of the DRA government and poet Sulaiman Layeq died from wounds he had suffered from a Taliban bombing in Kabul the previous year. Layeq’s poem ‘Eternal Passions’ (1959) describes the longing for that different world he and so many others had worked to build, a project that was obliterated by the U.S. interventions:

the sound of love
overflowed from the hearts
volcanic, drunken
…
years passed
yet still these desires
like winds upon the snows
or like waves upon waters
cries of women, wailers

The Afghans are largely glad to see the back of the U.S. occupation, to be one more Saigon in a long sequence. But this is not a victory for humanity. It will not be easy for Afghanistan to emerge out of these nightmare decades, but the desire to do so can still be heard.

For twenty years, two dominant narratives have shaped our view of the illegal U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and neither one of these narratives would readily accept the use of such terms as ‘illegal’, ‘invasion’ and ‘occupation.’ 

The framing of the U.S. “military intervention” in Afghanistan, starting on October 7, 2001, as the official start of what was dubbed as a global ‘War on Terror’ was left almost entirely to U.S. government strategists. Former U.S. President George W. Bush, his vice president, Dick Cheney, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and an army of spokespersons, neoconservative ‘intellectuals’, journalists and so on, championed the military option as a way to rid Afghanistan of its terrorists, make the world a safe place and, as a bonus, bring democracy to Afghanistan and free its oppressed women. 

For that crowd, the U.S. war in an already war-torn and extremely impoverished country was a just cause, maybe violent at times, but ultimately humanistic. 

Another narrative, also a Western one, challenged the gung-ho approach used by the Bush administration, argued that democracy cannot be imposed by force, reminded Washington of Bill Clinton’s multilateral approach to international politics, and warned against the “cut and run” style of foreign policymaking, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. 

Although both narratives may have seemed at odds, at times, in actuality they accepted the basic premise that the United States is capable of being a moral force in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Whether those who may refer to themselves as ‘antiwar’ realize this or not, they, too, subscribe to the same notion of U.S. exceptionalism and ‘Manifest Destiny’ that Washington continues to assign to itself.

The main difference between both of these narratives is that of methodology and approach and not whether the United States has the right to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of another country, whether to ‘eradicate terrorism’ or to supposedly help a victim population, incapable of helping themselves and desperate for a Western savior. 

However, the humiliating defeat suffered by the United States in Afghanistan should inspire a whole new way of thinking, one that challenges all Western narratives, without exception, in Afghanistan and throughout the world. 

Obviously, the United States has failed in Afghanistan, not only militarily and politically—let alone in terms of “state-building” and every other way—the U.S.-Western narratives on Afghanistan were, themselves, a failure. Mainstream media, which for two decades have reported on the country with a palpable sense of moral urgency, now seem befuddled. U.S. ‘experts’ are as confused as ordinary people regarding the hasty retreat from Kabul, the bloody mayhem at the airport or why the United States was in Afghanistan in the first place. 

Meanwhile, the ‘humanistic interventionists’ are more concerned with Washington’s ‘betrayal’ of the Afghan people, ‘leaving them to their fate’, as if the Afghans are irrational beings with no agency of their own, or as if the Afghan people have called on the United States to invade their country or have ‘elected’ U.S. generals as their democratic representatives.

The U.S.-Western propaganda, which has afflicted our collective understanding of Afghanistan for twenty years and counting, has been so overpowering to the point that we are left without the slightest understanding of the dynamics that led to the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country. The latter group is presented in the media as if entirely alien to the socio-economic fabric of Afghanistan. This is why the Taliban’s ultimate victory seemed, not only shocking but extremely confusing as well. 

For twenty years, the very little we knew about the Taliban has been communicated to us through Western media analyses and military intelligence assessments. With the Taliban’s viewpoint completely removed from any political discourse pertaining to Afghanistan, an alternative Afghan national narrative was carefully constructed by the United States and its NATO partners. These were the ‘good Afghans’, we were told, ones who dress up in Western-style clothes, speak English, attend international conferences and, supposedly, respect women. These were also the Afghans who welcomed the U.S. occupation of their country, as they benefited greatly from Washington’s generosity.

If those ‘good Afghans’ truly represented Afghan society, why did their army of 300,000 men drop their weapons and flee the country, along with their president, without a serious fight? And if the 75,000 poorly-armed and, at times, malnourished Taliban seemed to merely represent themselves, why then did they manage to defeat formidable enemies in a matter of days?

There can be no argument that an inferior military power, like that of the Taliban, could have possibly persisted, and ultimately won, such a brutal war over the course of many years, without substantial grassroots support pouring in from the Afghan people in large swathes of the country. The majority of the Taliban recruits who have entered Kabul on August 15 were either children, or were not even born, when the United States invaded their country, all those years ago. What compelled them to carry arms? To fight a seemingly unwinnable war? To kill and be killed? And why did they not join the more lucrative business of working for the United States, like many others have?

We are just beginning to understand the Taliban narrative, as their spokespersons are slowly communicating a political discourse that is almost entirely unfamiliar to most of us. A discourse that we were not allowed to hear, interact with or understand. 

Now that the United States and its NATO allies are leaving Afghanistan, unable to justify or even explain why their supposed humanitarian mission led to such an embarrassing defeat, the Afghan people are left with the challenge of weaving their own national narrative, one that must transcend the Taliban and their enemies to include all Afghans, regardless of their politics or ideology. 

Afghanistan is now in urgent need of a government that truly represents the people of that country. It must grant rights to education, to minorities and to political dissidents, not to acquire a Western nod of approval, but because the Afghan people deserve to be respected, cared for and treated as equals. This is the true national narrative of Afghanistan that must be nurtured outside the confines of the self-serving Western mischaracterization of Afghanistan and her people.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

Editor’s Note: The Taliban victory over the weekend and the evacuation of U.S. nationals cries out for context. That is why Toward Freedom is publishing this article that was submitted prior to the weekend’s events.

As each day goes by, the Taliban’s forces edge closer to controlling all of Afghanistan. In the first week of August, the Taliban swept through the northern provinces of the country—Jawzjan, Kunduz, and Sar-e Pul—which form an arc alongside the borders of the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The violence has been severe; the pain inflicted upon civilians by the intensity of the fighting has been terrible. Having withdrawn its ground forces, the United States sent in its B-52s to bomb targets in the city of Sheberghan (capital of the province of Jawzjan); reports suggest that at least 200 people were killed in the bombings. It shows the weakness of the government in Kabul that its Ministry of Defense’s spokesperson Fawad Aman cheered on the bombing.

It’s unlikely that the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani will outlast the Taliban’s lightning strikes. The U.S. bombing will slow the advance, but it will not be able to reverse the tide. That is why regional powers in Asia have deepened contacts with the Taliban’s leadership, whose governance of the entire country seems inevitable.

 

‘Moderate’ Taliban

“The Taliban is not an entity by itself,” Heela Najibullah said when I spoke to her during the second week of August. “It is made up of groups of extremists and militants who use the rhetoric of jihad to achieve power.” Najibullah, author of the important book Reconciliation and Social Healing in Afghanistan (2017), is the daughter of Mohammed Najibullah, the president of Afghanistan from 1987 to 1992. Since the Doha Agreement (2020), Heela Najibullah said, “the Taliban has demonstrated in action that it is not moderate but has become even more extreme in the type of violence it is carrying out against the Afghan people and state.” The Taliban has rejected every overture of a ceasefire from Afghan peace organizations.

A close look at the Taliban leadership reveals little change since its founding in September 1994. The public face of the Taliban—Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar—founded the Taliban and was a close associate of the first emir of the movement, Mullah Omar. After the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, it was Baradar who took Mullah Omar on the back of a motorcycle to their refuge in Pakistan. Baradar, trusted by Pakistani intelligence, puts no daylight between himself the current leader of the Taliban—Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada—and his two deputies—Mullah Yaqoob (son of the late Mullah Omar) and Sirajuddin Haqqani (leader of Pakistan’s Haqqani network). Akhundzada ran the Taliban’s judicial system from 1997 to 2001 and was responsible for some of the most heinous of its judgments. When COVID-19 infected most of the leadership, decision-making fell to Baradar.

At the March 2021 international peace conference in Moscow, the entire 10-person Taliban delegation—led by Baradar—was male (to be fair, there were only four women among the 200 Afghans in the process). One of the four women at the table was Dr. Habiba Sarabi, who was appointed as minister of Women’s Affairs in 2004 and then became the first female governor of an Afghan province in 2005. It is important to note that she was the governor of Bamyan, a province where the Taliban had blown up two sixth-century statues of Buddha in March 2001. In October 2020, Dr. Sarabi pointed out that Afghan women are “more mobilized,” although Afghanistan now faces “a crucial moment in our fight.” Reports have already appeared of forced marriages and public floggings of women in Taliban-controlled areas.

 

National Reconciliation

Women are more mobilized, says Dr. Sarabi, but they are not a powerful social movement. Afghanistan’s more liberal and left social forces “are active underground and are not an organized force,” Najibullah tells me. These forces include the educated sections, who do not want “extremist groups to drag the country into another proxy war.” That proxy war would be between the Taliban, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, and other militant groups that are no less dangerous than the Taliban or the U.S. government.

Najibullah reaches back to the time when her father proposed the Afghan National Reconciliation Policy. A letter President Najibullah wrote to his family in 1995 could have been written today: “Afghanistan has multiple governments now, each created by different regional powers. Even Kabul is divided into little kingdoms… unless and until all the actors [regional and global powers] agree to sit at one table, leave their differences aside to reach a genuine consensus on non-interference in Afghanistan and abide to their agreement, the conflict will go on.”

Heela Najibullah says that the National Reconciliation Policy would require the political participation of a range of actors in an international and a regional conference. These actors would include those who have used Afghanistan for their own national agendas, such as India and Pakistan. At such a conference, Najibullah suggests, Afghanistan needs to be “recognized officially as a neutral state,” and this “neutral state” should be endorsed by the UN Security Council. “Once this is achieved, a broad-based government can be in charge until elections are held, reforms are discussed, and mechanisms are drawn for its implementation,” Najibullah says.

 

Proxy Politics

In the 1990s, President Najibullah’s policy was hampered by the deepening of proxy politics. Foreign powers acted through their armed emissaries—people such as Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Sibghatullah Mojaddedi—to cause mayhem in the country. They opened the door to the Taliban, which swept out of northern Pakistan across Afghanistan. Najibullah took refuge in the UN compound in Kabul, and then was killed mercilessly by the Taliban inside that compound in September 1996. Neither the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistani-backed forces (from Rabbani to Mojaddedi) nor the Taliban were interested in any kind of reconciliation policy.

Nor are they now invested in a genuine peace. The Taliban have shown that they can make significant advances and that they will use their territorial gains for political advantage; nonetheless, pragmatic members of the Taliban say that they just do not have the resources and expertise to govern a modern state. President Ashraf Ghani barely controls his own government, largely defenseless without U.S. air power. Each could bring something to the table in a reconciliation process, but its likelihood is low.

Meanwhile, foreign powers continue to treat Afghanistan as a battlefield for their regional ambitions. Blindness to history governs the attitude of several capitals, who know from previous experience that extremism cannot be contained within Afghanistan; it devastates the region. Heela Najibullah’s call to consider her father’s National Reconciliation Policy is not merely a daughter’s hope. It is perhaps the only viable path for peace in Afghanistan.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.