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.
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).
This article was produced by Peoples Dispatch/Globetrotter News Service.
As Afghanistan’s economy continues to spiral, as many as 34 million Afghans are living below the poverty line, says a new UN report. The “Afghanistan Socio-Economic Outlook 2023” report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on April 18 highlights the impact of cuts in international aid to Afghanistan since the Taliban took power.
The report notes that the number of people below the poverty line in Afghanistan has increased from 19 million in 2020 to 34 million today. It also adds, “Even if the UN aid appeal for international assistance to reach $4.6 billion in 2023 succeeds, it may fall short of what is needed to improve conditions for millions of Afghans.”
The UNDP report comes after the UN said that it was “reviewing its presence” in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s ban on Afghan women from working for the international organization earlier this month. The UN statement suggested that it may be planning to suspend its operations in the country.
The report also notes that Afghanistan is currently facing a severe fiscal crisis after the ending of foreign assistance “that previously accounted for almost 70 percent of the government budget.” A severe banking crisis also continues. In 2022, Afghanistan’s GDP contracted by 3.6 percent. The report adds that the average real per capita income has also declined by 28 percent from the 2020 level.
On May 1, the UN began holding crucial talks regarding Afghanistan in Doha. The participants include the five permanent UN Security Council members, countries in the region such as Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and key players such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Notably, the de facto Taliban government of Afghanistan was not invited to participate. “Any meeting about Afghanistan without the participation of the Afghan government is ineffective and counterproductive,” said Abdul Qahar Balkhi, Taliban foreign ministry spokesman.
A C-130 Hercules aircraft from the Republic of Korea Air Force sits on the flight line at Rosecrans Air National Guard Base, St. Joseph, Missouri, May 12, 2022. C-130s from the ROKAF, Little Rock Air Force Base, and Dyess AFB were attending the Advanced Airlift Tactics Training Center’s Advanced Tactics Aircrew Course / credit: Michael Crane / U.S. Air National Guard
Editor’s Note: This analysis originally appeared in People’s Dispatch.
Between August 22 and September 1, the United States and South Korea concluded their largest joint military drills in the Korean Peninsula since 2017, under the name ‘Ulchi Freedom Shield’. Over the last four years, the scope of the annual exercises had been scaled back, first because of U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts at diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and later because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With these drills, however, the United States and South Korea seem to be attempting to send a clear message to both North Korea and China of their united military posture in the region, and come at a time when the U.S. encirclement of China continues rapidly.
The military relationship between the United States and South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), has a long history, stretching back at least as far as the Korean War. The United States has maintained a force of at least tens of thousands of troops in South Korea since prior to the Korean War, and, while South Korean forces are otherwise independent, at times of war they are subordinated to the command of a U.S. general as part of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command. About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, making it the country with the third-highest number of U.S. troops outside of the United States.
While the recent exercises have been conducted against a nameless enemy, it is not hard to see towards whom their message is aimed. The site of the exercises is only 32 kilometers from the border and De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Live-fire tank and troop maneuvers have been practiced as the United States and the ROK engage in simulations and seek to increase interoperability of their deployments and technologies. War-gamed attempts to seize “weapons of mass destruction” and mount a defense of Seoul suggest that they are preparations for potential conflict with North Korea.
Trump’s attempts to seek a diplomatic end to the North Korean nuclear program were unsuccessful, as have been U.S. economic sanctions and blockades. These exercises must be seen as a continuing show of force towards the same chief end. As part of his campaign and even more recently, new South Korean Premier Yoon Suk-yeol has touted his willingness to engage in “decapitation strikes” against the North Korean leadership, as part of a broader turn towards support for, and from, U.S. interests in the region.
He has also more recently offered a bouquet of economic enticements for North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, an offer that was rejected out of hand by Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, who pointed out that it was merely the restatement of a similar offer that had been made and dismissed in the past. The North sees its nuclear arsenal as non-negotiable and the key to its global legitimacy, and is no doubt also aware of what has happened to other countries, such as Libya and Iran, that have agreed to put holds on their military nuclear capabilities at the behest of the United States. With U.S. bases and troops having been positioned so close to its border for almost its entire existence as a country, it is easy to understand why North Korea does not see a reduction in its military capabilities as a particularly pressing or, indeed, sensible priority.
The resumption of these joint military exercises has also been viewed with alarm by China, which, like North Korea, has repeatedly pointed to U.S. attempts to set up a NATO-like organization in Asia. As tensions in the region reached unprecedented levels recently following U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, it seems the U.S. military presence in the region is only likely to increase in the near future.
South Korea and the United States also recently participated in trilateral military exercises with Japan near Hawai’i, signaling what might be a new low in hostilities that trace their roots to the Japanese occupation of Korea, which only ended in 1945, when the administration of South Korea was handed over briefly to the United States. This too has been noted with concern by China, and suggests that the United States is coordinating its allies in the region as it attempts to extend its global hegemony ever-further eastward.
