Midwifery students in Afghanistan / credit: United Nations
Editor’s Note: The Taliban victory over the weekend and the evacuation of U.S. nationals cries out for context. That is why Toward Freedomis 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 Having withdrawn its ground forces, the United States sent in its B-52s to bomb targets in the city of Sheberghan (capital of the province of Jawzjan); reports suggest that at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.
Credit: Malina Suliman (Afghanistan), Girl in the Ice Box, 2013.
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.
In Bogotá during Colombia’s national strike, two women hold placards that say, “We didn’t give birth to children of war” and “They got firearms, we got fire in our soul” / credit: Antonio Cascio
“Far too many women are fighting—not only for their rights, but for the rights of all,” says Yomali Torres, an Afro-Colombian activist. The 26-year-old joined throngs of women in the streets of Colombia over the past month to demand an end to patriarchal oppression at the hands of a U.S.-backed neoliberal state.
Women’s presence in Colombia’s national strike—both as activists and as victims—has caught the world’s attention. Many have spoken out against police violence and sexual abuse during the current demonstrations. This, however, is not a new issue. Police, armed forces and illegal groups have used women’s bodies as weapons of war for decades.
The strike, which marks its 1-month anniversary today, continues unabated. It started as a response to a tax reform project that would have devastated middle- and low-income households. Yet, this is not the core of social discontent among Colombians. This is clear as the strike continues, even after the president called on Congress to withdraw the tax reform bill.
At the end of 2019, Colombia saw mass mobilizations of diverse sectors of society, who expressed their discontent with the government of President Iván Duque. Among the criticisms were his ineffective economic, social, and environmental policies, the lack of implementation of a peace treaty with militant group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the numerous assassinations of social leaders, among others. According to Colombian state agency Investigation and Accusation Unity (Unidad de Investigación y Acusación), 904 leaders were assassinated between December 2016 and April 2021.
Gender Violence
Historically, conflict and social inequalities have most affected women. Violence and sexual abuse are commonly wielded to gain control over the territories women and their communities inhabit, as well as their natural resources. The High Commissioner for Human Rights released a document in 2005 indicating 52 percent of displaced women reported having suffered some type of physical abuse and 36 percent had been forced by strangers to have sexual intercourse.
A group of protesters from the first line stand behind their homemade shields during a Bogotá demonstration as Colombia’s national strike continues. Among them, the “First Line Mothers,” a group of mothers who stand together against police violence / credit Antonio Cascio
In a context of multiple violations of human rights—including extrajudicial killings, disappeared persons, torture, arbitrary detentions and use of firearms—gender violence continues to be deployed against the population during the national strike. Colombia’s Department of Protection of Citizen’s Rights has reported 106 cases of gender violence, of which 23 are acts of sexual violence.
With slogans such as “The revolution would be feminist, or it will not be,” “Not one less,” and “With me, whatever you want—but with her, nothing,” protesters have rejected violence against women, while drawing attention to gender inequalities.
One of the cases that has generated widespread indignation involved a 17-year-old girl from Popayan, who committed suicide after having been arrested by police. Before taking her own life, she wrote a statement accusing four members of the riot police of sexual assault. The girl had posted on Facebook police only released her after learning she was the daughter of a police officer.
Feminist Groups and their Demands
Women have taken to the streets, demanding equal access to education, healthcare and employment. They have assumed leading roles as human-rights observers, front-line defenders and community organizers. As a result, human rights groups—formed mostly by women—have suffered acts of intimidation and violence.
Silhouette of a woman in front of a fire on the streets of Bogotá during Colombia’s national strike / credit: Antonio Cascio
“We received death threats from the riot police. They told us they did not want us alive,” says Isabella Galvis of the Waman Iware Human Rights Collective. “At the moment, we do not have guarantees. They are using firearms during the protests, which is illegal under Colombian law.”
Feminist organizations move ahead despite the challenges, having organized multiple events. On May 10, a coalition of 173 feminist groups presented a list of proposals during the current crisis.
These proposals included:
A call for negotiation including all groups involved in the protests,
an exercise of justice regarding human-rights violations, and
a universal basic income that prioritizes women affected by the pandemic, among others.
The Women Who Are Most Vulnerable to Inequalities and Violence
Afro-Colombians and Indigenous peoples have been affected—directly or indirectly—by racism during the protests. Calí, the city where police have exercised the most repression, has experienced the highest number of deaths during the strike. It also has the highest concentration of Afro-Colombian communities, according to the National Administrative Department of Statistics.
An Afro-Colombian woman standing on the first line during a demonstration in Bogotá held during Colombia’s national strike / credit: Antonio Cascio
The high level of inequality puts Calí at the center of these protests. Afro-Colombian people contend with uneven opportunities in the areas of education, healthcare and employment. That means the reforms the government has proposed would strongly affect Afro-Colombians, and women in particular.
“We are here commemorating Afro-Colombians today. We want to fight for our future and our rights,” explains Maria Niza Obregón, a 17-year-old Afro-Colombian girl, who supports the protests. “We want to live, not to survive.”
A clear example of this was the fate of the government’s health reform, which sank after the first 20 days of protests. The regions with the highest concentration of Afro-Colombians and Indigenous peoples also have the poorest health systems in the country, according to a report by organization Así Vamos en Salud.
Yomali Torres, a 26-year-old member of Afro-Colombian human-rights and peace organization Cococauca, denounces the lack of hospitals and specialists in her territory on the Pacific Coast of Cauca.
“If someone has chest pain, the patient has to be transferred to Calí or Popayan,” Torres says. “If we do not die, it is thanks to ancestral medicine.”
Afro-Colombian women have been particularly outspoken during the national strike, especially in Calí.
Torres condemns the violations of the rights of women, and of the Colombian population in general.
“In one way or another, we are taking advantage of the strike to demand justice for all of the women who have been raped, beaten and disappeared,” Torres says.
The United Nations states Indigenous and Afro-Colombian women have been affected disproportionately by the violence derived from the conflict. “Among 3,445 cases of murder in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian individuals, 65.5 percent were women,” the UN reports.
As a sign of indignation, the community of Guapi organized on May 7 an event called, “The Last Night.” With traditional cultural expressions, they commemorated those who have given their lives fighting for the rights of Afro-Colombians and the entire country. This celebration was carried out with artistic representations of graves and singing alabaos, or ancestral songs for the dead.
A month after the first call for a national strike, the different sectors of society are far from calling off the protests. This comes even as protesters’ blockades have generated a shortage of goods in certain communities. As Torres says, “We will not give up, because boats are not arriving with goods. Historically, we have felt hunger for more than 200 years. For us, this is not a real challenge.”
Natalia Torres Garzongraduated with an M.Sc. in Globalization and Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, United Kingdom. She is a freelance journalist who focuses on social and political issues in Latin America, especially in connection to Indigenous communities, women and the environment. With photographer Antonio Cascio, she founded the radio-photography program, Radio Rodando. Her work has been published in the section Planeta Futuro from El País, New Internationalist and Earth Island.
An Apache attack helicopter in approach in September 2020, Afghanistan / credit: Andre Klimke on Unsplash
A dizzying amount of commentary, both solicited and not, has been spared on the Taliban’s brutal, unilateral recovery of power in Afghanistan. Unlike a great majority of political events, it is far from unwarranted. Any sane person observing such a horrific spectacle, certainly amplified by sharp memories of the Taliban’s appalling human rights record prior to the U.S. incursion, would feel compelled to offer an observation or two, despite how redundant it may be.
Coincidentally, exactly 23 years ago, as part of a wider effort to “counter an immediate threat from the Bin Laden network,” known officially as Operation Infinite Reach, the Clinton administration struck “terrorist facilities and infrastructure” in Afghanistan, where it believed “a gathering of key terrorist leaders” was to take place. The attack failed according to then counter-terrorism czar, Richard A. Clarke, who later lamented that the public backlash made it more difficult to continue counter-terrorism operations in the region. [1] The Taliban, on the other hand, in the months following Infinite Reach, while officially condemning the attack and stating that the endeavor’s main target, Osama Bin Laden, would never be handed over to the United States, resolved to secretly negotiate with President Clinton and his staff over the extradition of the al-Qaeda leader. Notwithstanding their rhetoric, the group was not too fond of him; in fact, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, once stated that Bin Laden “is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat; I can neither swallow him nor spit him out.” [2] For their part, the United States “was willing to pay almost any price for Bin Laden” as well as grant diplomatic recognition to the government (which the Talib regime craved) and “millions of dollars in cash plus millions in humanitarian aid,” eclipsing the so-called prevailing issue of “women’s rights,” which U.S. negotiators intimated they could be flexible on. [3] The dynamic, as universally acknowledged, changed drastically after the attacks of September 11. There was no longer any compromise to be had; the Taliban were either to hand over Osama Bin Laden or they would be taken out. The United States simply would not tolerate this massive affront to its “national security”.
What followed needs no recounting, though it did receive its fair share of critics at the time, quite markedly, from opposition groups within Afghanistan. In an interview with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former mujahideen fighter and major Taliban adversary (as well as later victim) Abdul Haq argued that the United States “is trying to show its muscle, score a victory, and scare everyone in the world”; his view was shared by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, otherwise known as RAWA, who, in a rallying cry to the Afghan people, condemned United States for “launching a vast aggression on our country” after supporting harmful policies in the region for years. Haq and RAWA also came to a chilling conclusion in deriding the Western military blitz: namely, that the invading powers did not care what would happen to ordinary Afghans. The observation seemed fair enough; after the U.S. assault had begun, the Taliban all but backed off, or, in the words of one Afghan, had “vanished like ghosts”. [4]
However, as the highly respected Pakistani foreign policy commentator and journalist Ahmed Rashid chronicles in his excellent series on the war, the United States’ gross incompetence bordering on indifference, lack of strategic (and sufficient) financial investment as well as adequate military support beyond indiscriminate bombing, and overall willful ignorance of the complexities in Afghan society, doomed the venture before it could have any meaningful impact, thus inadvertently restoring the Taliban’s political viability. Narrating how the conflict was treated as a “sideshow” by the Bush administration in favor of the war in Iraq, made abundantly clear by the West’s “dependence on warlords” for Afghanistan’s security, and the way President Obama, while making superficial plays to portray some level of commitment to “fighting terrorism” (such as increasing troop presence), ultimately showed little interest in improvements to policy, Rashid paints a picture of extreme dysfunction spawned by a startling lack of seriousness in regards to the 20-year war effort. [5] This not only guaranteed anti-U.S. sentiment amongst Afghans, but, with some help from neighboring Pakistan, allowed the Taliban to take advantage of the weaknesses in the Western-backed government. [6] Rashid’s grim assessment was shared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s office (SIGAR), who, in its final report, also noted a fundamental defect of the entire “nation-building” process: The metric of the project’s success, for no other reason than it was easier for Congress to monitor, was based on “money spent” rather than “program effectiveness.”
Predictably, while allowing political leaders and top military brass to spout the rhetoric of “progress,” this framework left little room for robust monitoring-and-evaluation (M&E) mechanisms, thereby blocking “honest assessments” of reconstruction work. All of this at the expense of $2 trillion in U.S. taxpayer cash (a sizable chunk of it consumed by corruption) and the hopes of “30 million Afghans and the U.S. soldiers fighting for them.” [7] Yet, curiously, the standard judgment across the board characterizes the Afghanistan adventure as a “mistake,” “massive failure” and “defeat” for the United States, as opposed to what indeed sounded like a way for United States “to show its muscle,” without considering the consequences, and then consciously neglecting the fallout.
Of course, the questions that immediately arise are why so many years and why so much money. Some say for profits of the defense industry/private contractors (Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex”), others cry imperialism/hegemony, or perhaps it truly was a noble cause that went awry. Probably the most cynical of these theories, and thereby, the most popular, is the first. Yet the profits that the defense industry or, for example, the Department of Defense (DoD)’s top five military contractors, Lockheed Martin (LM), Boeing, Northrop Grumman (NG), General Dynamics Co (GDC), and Raytheon made off of Afghanistan, look fairly unremarkable when their revenues are explored more carefully.
It is certainly true that all five of these companies not only reported a significant uptick in their stock value but also their profits during the Global War on Terror. However, the United States’ intervention in Afghanistan played little, if any, direct role in their fortunes. According to an analysis done by Avascent (a management consulting firm well-known for advising the defense industry), while defense stocks “provided annualized returns of 14 percent versus a broader market that was up only one percent” from the time the War on Terror was declared in 2001 to the 2008 election campaign (which oversaw substantial increases in spending by the DoD), they fell below the broader market after “rising concern over the federal budget deficit” led to a disruption in investor confidence over “growth prospects for defense.” To compensate for this, the industry focused on different strategies such as “divesting less profitable businesses” and stock buybacks, as opposed to relying on Pentagon spending, eventually returning the industry to a 12 percent profit margin by 2014; then, when the Trump Administration arrived in 2015, significantly increasing the defense budget to serve “a National Defense Strategy that focused squarely on China” (which did not come close to post 9/11 spending), the defense industry reverted to its original blueprint. Beyond this, Afghanistan’s meager role is illustrated even more vividly when one probes how exactly the $2 trillion was spent. Although the DoD has never been particularly clear on this point (for reasons one could guess), it has repeatedly been pointed out that perhaps the most bizarre feature of the Pentagon budget is how much of it is unrelated to actual military engagements. Indeed, there is a massive figure presented every year for both congressional approval and the public eye, but these funds are reserved for the Pentagon’s more bureaucratic functions such as paying salaries, endowments for research and development, weapons procurement, etc., otherwise known as the “base budget”. It is also where the money for contracts with “defense hardware” firms such as LM, Boeing, GDC, NG and Raytheon comes from. Funds reserved exclusively to “theaters of war” such as Iraq and Afghanistan are part of what is called the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, and though the money provided, usually upwards of $100 billion annually, pales in comparison to the base budget, it is surely nothing to take lightly. In fact, the main targets for criticism in (rightly) highlighting the role of the private sector in Afghanistan, that is, private mercenary companies such as Dyncorp Intl., (now Amentum) and construction companies, such as Fluor Global, receive their funds from the OCO budget ($107 billion since 2002). It should be understood, however, that these companies are international in scale and reach. There is no doubt that Afghanistan presented a number of payday opportunities and, according to most sources, will continue to do so; this does not make U.S. involvement there a necessity. More than anything, to say that the United States launched a ground invasion of an already unstable country, and wasted a few trillion dollars so private contractors could make a few billion, sounds like lazy analysis at best, and regurgitating ideological doctrine at worst. This is not to say that ideological doctrine is inaccurate, lest we forget the age-old adage of the broken clock. Those decently familiar with the history of U.S. foreign policy in the past 100 years are well aware that the United States has deliberately intervened in other countries to install governments favorable to its interests (such as controlling resources) and given support to authoritarian regimes for the same reason; in truth, one would be hard pressed to find examples (barring the Second World War) of U.S. intervention where neither of these are the case. As such, arriving at such conclusions about the War On Terror is completely fair, but in the case of Afghanistan, it is wrongheaded.
Firstly, while there has been significant hype over the “trillions” of dollars in mineral reserves the Taliban now has control over, there is also a significant amount of uncertainty regarding their extraction potential, especially since “large foreign investments” (including a few by China) over the years have “largely failed”. This is not to say it is an impossibility. Perhaps the Taliban’s authoritarian streak will provide the level of order required to make them a major player in rare-earth and natural gas markets, but before that happens, they will require international legitimacy. This is where power matters, and in the current international order, where U.S. power is decisive.
When the U.S. withdrawal commenced, many declared the end of “liberal imperialism”, that Afghanistan was truly “the graveyard of empires”, and U.S. power/credibility had finally reached its limits. Interestingly, these statements go little beyond ideological cliches, peripheral knowledge of Afghanistan as well as its history, and Western-variety sentimentality, which, ironically, attempt to condemn the same type of statements that many say lit the spark for and sustained the invasion. One should recall, though, the relationship between the United States and the Taliban prior to the 9/11 attacks, and examine what exactly has changed. As laid out above, the Taliban had no principled commitment to sheltering Bin Laden and his fellow Al-Qaeda operatives; a fledgling “Islamic Emirate” at the time, diplomatic recognition from the United States would, de facto, grant them international legitimacy as a state and most likely, a spot in the international economy. 20 years later, Osama Bin Laden has been assassinated by U.S. Navy Seals (shockingly, he was not in Afghanistan), the “nation-building” project in Afghanistan is supposedly a “failure”, and the Taliban has revived its Islamic Emirate. Have their goals changed in any significant way? According to the treaty (known as the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan) negotiated between the Trump Administration and Taliban representatives in Qatar last February (notably, without the presence of the Ghani government), not at all. In exchange for pulling out U.S. troops, a pledge not to intervene in internal Afghan politics, and (reviewing) the easing of sanctions, the Taliban has agreed to adopt U.S. security interests and abide by them to a tee. Rather strange terms for a group that “defeated” the United States; one would think they might demand a bit more than an “official withdrawal” (while saying nothing about U.S. private contractors), and a promise not to intervene in a politics that U.S. officials, by their own admission, were already quite ignorant of. Most importantly, the lifting of sanctions, crucial for the Taliban if they hope to avoid famines and take the first step towards official diplomatic recognition, looks as though it will happen slowly at the whim of U.S. President Joe Biden, rightly or wrongly. Indeed, the future of Afghanistan looks like it will be made on the United States’ terms.
As the population of Afghanistan becomes ensnared in the mayhem of U.S. evacuations, harsh offensives by a looming Islamic State, and the Taliban’s violent struggle to solidify their control, it is imperative that we ask ourselves whether or not the U.S. withdrawal, much like the invasion itself, was a wise decision. Whatever the present theatrics of international news outlets may suggest, there is no doubt that the 20 years of callousness displayed towards Afghanistan by four U.S. presidential administrations as well as the U.S. media indicates that a quick exit from the country was not only inevitable but desirable. Incredibly, the reaction of ordinary Afghans, especially Afghan women, again, much like the invasion itself, seems to demonstrate otherwise. Though, at the end of the day, they should realize that U.S. power is as forceful as it ever was. If it was not so, perhaps their objections would have been heard and possibly heeded.
Bharat Tangellamudi is a freelance writer.
Footnotes
Richard A. Clarke. Against All Enemies: Inside United States’s War on Terror. (New York: Free Press, 2004)
Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 164-179.
Jonathan Cristol. The United States and the Taliban Before and After 9/11. (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 51-60.
Anand Gopal. No Good Men Among the Living: United States, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2014), 8.
Ahmed Rashid. Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. (New York: Viking Press, 2008), 196-200; Ahmed Rashid. Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. (New York: Viking Press, 2012).
Ahmed Rashid. Taliban: The Power of Militant Islam in Afghanistan and Beyond. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).