Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Debacle in
Afghanistan
Tariq
Ali
August
16, 2021
New
Left Review Side Car
The fall of Kabul
to the Taliban on 15 August 2021 is a major political and ideological defeat
for the American Empire. The crowded helicopters carrying US Embassy staff to
Kabul airport were startlingly reminiscent of the scenes in Saigon – now Ho Chi
Minh City – in April 1975. The speed with which Taliban forces stormed the country
was astonishing; their strategic acumen remarkable. A week-long offensive ended
triumphantly in Kabul. The 300,000-strong Afghan army crumbled. Many refused to
fight. In fact, thousands of them went over to the Taliban, who immediately
demanded the unconditional surrender of the puppet government. President Ashraf
Ghani, a favourite of the US media, fled the country and sought refuge in Oman.
The flag of the revived Emirate is now fluttering over his Presidential palace.
In some respects, the closest analogy is not Saigon but nineteenth-century
Sudan, when the forces of the Mahdi swept into Khartoum and martyred General
Gordon. William Morris celebrated the Mahdi’s victory as a setback for the
British Empire. Yet while the Sudanese insurgents killed an entire garrison,
Kabul changed hands with little bloodshed. The Taliban did not even attempt to
take the US embassy, let alone target American personnel.
The twentieth
anniversary of the ‘War on Terror’ thus ended in predictable and predicted
defeat for the US, NATO and others who clambered on the bandwagon. However one
regards the Taliban’s policies – I have been a stern critic for many years –
their achievement cannot be denied. In a period when the US has wrecked one
Arab country after another, no resistance that could challenge the occupiers
ever emerged. This defeat may well be a turning point. That is why European
politicians are whinging. They backed the US unconditionally in Afghanistan,
and they too have suffered a humiliation – none more so than Britain.
Biden was left
with no choice. The United States had announced it would withdraw from
Afghanistan in September 2021 without fulfilling any of its ‘liberationist’
aims: freedom and democracy, equal rights for women, and the destruction of the
Taliban. Though it may be undefeated militarily, the tears being shed by
embittered liberals confirm the deeper extent of its loss. Most of them –
Frederick Kagan in the NYT, Gideon Rachman in the FT – believe
that the drawdown should have been delayed to keep the Taliban at bay. But
Biden was simply ratifying the peace process initiated by Trump, with Pentagon
backing, which saw an agreement reached in February 2020 in the presence of the
US, Taliban, India, China and Pakistan. The American security establishment
knew that the invasion had failed: the Taliban could not be subdued no matter
how long they stayed. The notion that Biden’s hasty withdrawal has somehow
strengthened the militants is poppycock.
The fact is that
over twenty years, the US has failed to build anything that might redeem its
mission. The brilliantly lit Green Zone was always surrounded by a darkness
that the Zoners could not fathom. In one of the poorest countries of the
world, billions were spent annually on air-conditioning the barracks
that housed US soldiers and officers, while food and clothing were regularly
flown in from bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It was hardly a surprise
that a huge slum grew on the fringes of Kabul, as the poor assembled to search
for pickings in dustbins. The low wages paid to Afghan security services could
not convince them to fight against their countrymen. The army, built up over
two decades, had been infiltrated at an early stage by Taliban
supporters, who received free training in the use of modern military equipment
and acted as spies for the Afghan resistance.
This was the
miserable reality of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Though credit where credit is
due: the country has witnessed a huge rise in exports. During the Taliban
years, opium production was strictly monitored. Since the US invasion it has
increased dramatically, and now accounts for 90% of the global heroin
market – making one wonder whether this protracted conflict should be seen,
partially at least, as a new opium war. Trillions have been made in profits and
shared between the Afghan sectors that serviced the occupation. Western
officers were handsomely paid off to enable the trade. One in ten young Afghans
are now opium addicts. Figures for NATO forces are unavailable.
As for the status of
women, nothing much has changed. There has been little social progress outside
the NGO-infested Green Zone. One of the country’s leading feminists in exile
remarked that Afghan women had three enemies: the Western occupation, the
Taliban and the Northern Alliance. With the departure of the United States, she
said, they will have two. (At the time of writing this can perhaps be amended
to one, as the Taliban’s advances in the north saw off key factions of the
Alliance before Kabul was captured). Despite repeated requests from journalists
and campaigners, no reliable figures have been released on the sex-work
industry that grew to service the occupying armies. Nor are there credible rape
statistics – although US soldiers frequently used sexual violence against ‘terror
suspects’, raped Afghan civilians and green-lighted child abuse
by allied militias. During the Yugoslav civil war, prostitution multiplied
and the region became a centre for sex trafficking. UN involvement in this
profitable business was well-documented. In Afghanistan, the full details are
yet to emerge.
Over 775,000 US
troops have fought in Afghanistan since 2001. Of those, 2,448 were killed,
along with almost 4,000 US contractors. Approximately 20,589 were wounded in
action according to the Defense [sic] Department. Afghan casualty
figures are difficult to calculate, since ‘enemy deaths’ that include civilians
are not counted. Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense
Alternatives estimated that at least 4,200–4,500 civilians were
killed by mid-January 2002 as a consequence of the US assault, both directly as
casualties of the aerial bombing campaign and indirectly in the humanitarian
crisis that ensued. By 2021, the Associated Press were reporting that
47,245 civilians had perished because of the occupation. Afghan civil rights
activists gave a higher total, insisting that 100,000 Afghans (many of them
non-combatants) had died, and three times that number had been wounded.
In 2019, the Washington
Post published a 2,000-page internal report commissioned by the US
federal government to anatomize the failures of its longest war: ‘The
Afghanistan Papers’. It was based on a series of interviews with US Generals
(retired and serving), political advisers, diplomats, aid workers and so on.
Their combined assessment was damning. General Douglas Lute, the ‘Afghan war
czar’ under Bush and Obama, confessed that ‘We were devoid of a fundamental
understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing…We didn’t have
the foggiest notion of what we’re undertaking…If the American people knew the
magnitude of this dysfunction.’ Another witness, Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy
Seal and a White House staffer under Bush and Obama, highlighted the vast waste
of resources: ‘What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1
trillion? … After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was
probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on
Afghanistan.’ He could have added: ‘And we still lost’.
Who was the enemy?
The Taliban, Pakistan, all Afghans? A long-serving US soldier was convinced
that at least one-third of Afghan police were addicted to drugs and another
sizeable chunk were Taliban supporters. This posed a major problem for US
soldiers, as an unnamed Special Forces honcho testified in 2017: ‘They thought
I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad
guys live…It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not
have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: “But who
are the bad guys, where are they?”’.
Donald Rumsfeld
expressed the same sentiment back in 2003. ‘I have no visibility into who the
bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq’, he wrote. ‘I read all the intel from the
community, and it sounds as though we know a great deal, but in fact, when you
push at it, you find out we haven’t got anything that is actionable. We are
woefully deficient in human intelligence.’ The inability to distinguish between
a friend and an enemy is a serious issue – not just on a Schmittean level, but
on a practical one. If you can’t tell the difference between allies and
adversaries after an IED attack in a crowded city market, you respond by
lashing out at everyone, and create more enemies in the process.
Colonel
Christopher Kolenda, an adviser to three serving Generals, pointed to another
problem with the US mission. Corruption was rampant from the beginning, he
said; the Karzai government was ‘self-organised into a kleptocracy.’ That
undermined the post-2002 strategy of building a state that could outlast the
occupation. ‘Petty corruption is like skin cancer, there are ways to deal with
it and you’ll probably be just fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher
level, is like colon cancer; it’s worse, but if you catch it in time, you’re
probably okay. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.’ Of
course, the Pakistani state – where kleptocracy is embedded at every level –
has survived for decades. But things weren’t so easy in Afghanistan, where
nation-building efforts were led by an occupying army and the central
government had scant popular support.
What of the fake
reports that the Taliban were routed, never to return? A senior figure in the
National Security Council reflected on the lies broadcast by his colleagues:
‘It was their explanations. For example, [Taliban] attacks are getting worse?
“That’s because there are more targets for them to fire at, so more attacks are
a false indicator of instability.” Then, three months later, attacks are still
getting worse? “It’s because the Taliban are getting desperate, so it’s
actually an indicator that we’re winning”…And this went on and on for two
reasons, to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the
troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would
cause the country to deteriorate.’
All this was an
open secret in the chanceries and defense [sic] ministries of NATO Europe. In
October 2014, the British Defense [sic] Secretary Michael
Fallon admitted that ‘Mistakes were made militarily, mistakes were
made by the politicians at the time and this goes back 10, 13 years…We’re not
going to send combat troops back into Afghanistan, under any circumstances.’
Four years later, Prime Minister Theresa May redeployed British troops
to Afghanistan, doubling its fighters ‘to help tackle the fragile security
situation’. Now the UK media is echoing the Foreign Office and criticising
Biden for having made the wrong move at the wrong time, with the head of the
British armed forces Sir Nick Carter suggesting a new invasion might
be necessary. Tory backbenchers, colonial nostalgiaists, stooge-journalists and
Blair-toadies are lining up to call for a permanent British presence in the
war-torn state.
What’s astonishing
is that neither General Carter nor his relays appear to have acknowledged the
scale of the crisis confronted by the US war machine, as set out in ‘The
Afghanistan Papers’. While American military planners have slowly woken up to
reality, their British counterparts still cling to a fantasy image of
Afghanistan. Some argue that the withdrawal will put Europe’s security at risk,
as al-Qaeda regroups under the new Islamic Emirate. But these forecasts are
disingenuous. The US and UK have spent years arming and assisting al-Qaeda in Syria,
as they did in Bosnia and in Libya. Such fearmongering can only function in a
swamp of ignorance. For the British public, at least, it does not seem to have
cut through. History sometimes presses urgent truths on a country through a
vivid demonstration of facts or an exposure of elites. The current withdrawal
is likely to be one such moment. Britons, already hostile to the War on Terror,
could harden in their opposition to future military conquests.
What does the
future hold? Replicating the model developed for Iraq and Syria, the US has
announced a permanent special military unit, staffed by 2,500 troops, to be
stationed at a Kuwaiti base, ready to fly to Afghanistan and bomb, kill and
maim should it become necessary. Meanwhile, a high-powered Taliban delegation
visited China last July, pledging that their country would never again be used
as a launch pad for attacks on other states. Cordial discussions were held with
the Chinese Foreign Minister, reportedly covering trade and economic ties. The
summit recalled similar meetings between Afghan mujahedeen and Western leaders
during the 1980s: the former appearing with their Wahhabi costumes and
regulation beard-cuts against the spectacular backdrop of the White House or 10
Downing Street. But now, with NATO in retreat, the key players are China,
Russia, Iran and Pakistan (which has undoubtedly provided strategic assistance
to the Taliban, and for whom this is a huge politico-military triumph). None of
them wants a new civil war, in polar contrast to the US and its allies after
the Soviet withdrawal. China’s close relations with Tehran and Moscow might
enable it to work towards securing some fragile peace for the citizens of this
traumatized country, aided by continuing Russian influence in the north.
Much emphasis has
been placed on the average age in Afghanistan: 18, in a population of 40
million. On its own this means nothing. But there is hope that young Afghans
will strive for a better life after the forty-year conflict. For Afghan women
the struggle is by no means over, even if only a single enemy remains. In
Britain and elsewhere, all those who want to fight on must shift their focus to
the refugees who will soon be knocking on NATO’s door. At the very least,
refuge is what the West owes them: a minor reparation for an unnecessary war.
Tariq Ali is a
British-Pakistani historian, novelist, filmmaker, political campaigner, and
commentator. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left
Review and Sin Permiso, and regularly contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch,
and the London Review of Books.
Read on: Tariq
Ali, ‘Mirage of the Good War’, NLR 50.
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