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AfghanistanAfghanistan and the dangers of cynical isolationismGeoffrey Bindman says that without collective action to defend the oppressed and the vulnerable, we are heading into dangerous isolationist territory L More
OpinionUS newsThe media is lambasting Biden over Afghanistan. He should stand firmBhaskar SunkaraThe president was right to withdraw the US from Afghanistan – and he’s being skewered for it
I served with Nato in Afghanistan – it was a bloated mess
Sun 29 Aug 2021 08.11 EDTLast modified on Sun 29 Aug 2021 08.12 EDTWhen Joe Biden, a conventional politician if there ever was one, said he was concluding the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan this month, in line with plans set in motion by the Trump administration, the response from the mainstream press was hostile. Following the Taliban takeover of the country, the tenor has only grown more hyperbolic.Joe Biden says new Kabul terror attack highly likely in next 24 to 36 hoursRead moreDuring the Trump years, publications like the New York Times and Washington Post presented themselves as the last defenses of freedom against creeping authoritarianism. The latter adopted a new slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness”, and spent millions on a Super Bowl ad featuring Tom Hanks extolling the importance of journalism as a profession.But for all this talk of “defending freedom”, the mainstream media has a history of reflexively defending militarism, foreign interventions and occupations. Biden – who dared fulfil a campaign promise and end America’s longest war – is learning this the hard way.As Eric Levitz recounts in New York Magazine, the media has created a public backlash against Biden, with outlets like the Times calling the withdrawal a humiliating fiasco. For the New York Times Editorial Board, the two-decade occupation of Afghanistan is described as a “nation-building project” that reflected “the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy”.Key to the media narrative is the echoing of “experts” on Afghanistan like former ambassador Ryan C Crocker, who wishes in another Times op-ed that instead of bolting after a couple of decades, US troops might have remained in Afghanistan for more than a half-century, as we’ve done on the Korean peninsula. Crocker regrets that “Mr Biden’s decision to withdraw all US forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure”.But as the writer Jeet Heer points out, the status quo was far from “affordable” for ordinary Afghans. The tragic figure of more than 2,000 dead US troops pales in comparison to the more than 200,000 Afghans killed since 2001. Indeed, prolonged civil war has put this year on pace to be the bloodiest for civilians as a failed US client state has overseen plummeting social indicators, widespread corruption and a total breakdown in public safety.The media had ignored the mounting chaos for years, only to laser-focus on it as a means to criticize Biden. They’ve ignored their own role in cheerleading a misguided “War on Terror” and pinned the blame for two decades of imperial hubris on the president who finally made good on promises to leave the country against the wishes of even some in his own party.What’s underlying much of the approach is a mainstream media fidelity to “expert” consensus. Many who presented themselves as fierce truth-tellers in the face of Trump hold the opinions of former intelligence and military officials in higher regard than that of a president democratically elected by 81.3 million people and pursuing a policy supported by 70% of Americans.Not only are corporate media pundits and talking heads wrong to advocate staying in Afghanistan, they’ve been wrong about generations of conflicts that ordinary people have opposed. Contrary to the popular imagination, opposition to wars from Vietnam to Iraq were spearheaded by workers, not the rich and the professional classes that serve them. It’s this general aversion to costly overseas conflict that the president should confidently embrace.Biden has never been a very good populist. For all his “Amtrak Joe” pretenses, he’s a creature of the Beltway, the ultimate establishment politician. It’s no surprise that his administration appears paralyzed in the face of criticism from its erstwhile elite allies. But unless he manages to push back against the narratives mounting against his administration, he’ll risk undermining his popular domestic agenda as well.Joe Biden did something good – and the media want to kill him for it. He should embrace their scorn and defend his actions to the American people.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
TopicsUS newsOpinionJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsUS press and publishingNew York TimesWashington PostcommentReuse this content More
The ObserverJoe Biden‘Biden’s worst nightmare’: how Afghanistan shook a president A rapid Taliban takeover, a chaotic evacuation and a deadly terror attack have shaken confidence in the commander-in-chief and US leadershipDavid Smith in Washington@ More
OpinionAfghanistanThe Guardian view on Afghanistan: chaos turns to carnageEditorialThe attack on Kabul airport underlines the west’s obligations, which do not end with the occupation Fri 27 Aug 2021 13.30 EDTLast modified on Fri 27 Aug 2021 17.45 EDTFor all that it had been warned of, was perhaps even half-expected, Thursday’s terrorist attack on Kabul’s Hamid Karzai airport was a deeply shocking event. The setting for the final unravelling of the west’s failure was already frightening. Thousands of people had struggled for days to gain access to the buildings and officials that they hoped would offer them a passport to safety. With Islamic State’s attack, which began not far from the Baron Hotel where British personnel were based, and is so far known to have killed 79 civilians and 13 US service people, what had been a worst-case scenario became reality.Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province and also as Isis-K, detonated a bomb that not only ripped apart lives, but also served as a bloodcurdling warning of what it may be capable of. Joe Biden, unsurprisingly, responded with a threat of his own: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay,” he said, following the carnage, addressing the terrorists directly for the benefit of an appalled domestic audience.What happens now is that the evacuation continues amid hugely elevated distress. Mr Biden has refused to waver from next Tuesday’s deadline, with the UK effort due to conclude before the weekend. On Friday, it was clear that even bombs had failed to deter the crowds bent on escape. Queues continued to form at the sewage canal close to the airport, while administrators failed to keep pace with demand for documents to be checked. Ben Wallace, the UK’s defence secretary, acknowledged that some of those entitled to come to Britain because they had worked for the embassy or military would be left behind. Others pointed out that his figure of 1,100 was an underestimate.The longer-term impact of the attack is harder to assess, beyond the obvious point that it is alarming – or terrifying, if you are an Afghan – that an Islamic State offshoot now occupies the position that it does. Much will depend on the capacity of the Taliban to withstand this assault on their authority, and on developing relations between the various strands and strongholds of extreme Islamism both within and beyond Afghanistan’s borders. Much faster than the west expected, the Taliban filled the vacuum created by the withdrawal negotiated by Donald Trump and enacted by his successor. Now, before the Americans have even left, the Taliban themselves are being confronted.The danger is that the Afghan state and civil society, after the west’s shamefully conducted withdrawal, will collapse altogether. Already, 300,000 people have been displaced following the Taliban’s advance over the summer. Three-quarters of all public expenditure (on hospitals, schools and so on) is derived from foreign aid. There is no reason to have any confidence in the Taliban’s governance capabilities. But things are likely to be even worse for Afghanistan’s population of almost 40 million, above all the women and girls who are already having basic rights such as education removed, if their leaders become consumed by factional infighting and paranoia. Already, following the attack, there are reports of unprecedented numbers of Afghans feeling across the border to Pakistan.Western countries, including the UK, must honour their obligations, not only to those who worked for them, including the refugees who must now be found homes and jobs, but to Afghan society as a whole. The international community should find common cause in the attempt to give the people of this broken country a chance. From a western perspective, this week’s explosion may have the appearance of a parting shot. For Afghans, the fear is that it marks the start of yet another bloody chapter.TopicsAfghanistanOpinionBiden administrationIslamic StateTalibanBen WallaceSouth and Central AsiaJoe BideneditorialsReuse this content More
AfghanistanKabul airport atrocity offers a glimpse of the chaos to come in AfghanistanJoe Biden left with no good options after deadliest day for US troops in Afghanistan in more than a decade David Smith in Washington@ More
OpinionAfghanistanWho’s to blame for the Afghanistan chaos? Remember the war’s cheerleadersGeorge MonbiotToday the media are looking for scapegoats, but 20 years ago they helped facilitate the disastrous intervention Wed 25 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 25 Aug 2021 05.53 EDTEveryone is to blame for the catastrophe in Afghanistan, except the people who started it. Yes, Joe Biden screwed up by rushing out so chaotically. Yes, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab failed to make adequate and timely provisions for the evacuation of vulnerable people. But there is a frantic determination in the media to ensure that none of the blame is attached to those who began this open-ended war without realistic aims or an exit plan, then waged it with little concern for the lives and rights of the Afghan people: the then US president, George W Bush, the British prime minister Tony Blair and their entourages.Indeed, Blair’s self-exoneration and transfer of blame to Biden last weekend was front-page news, while those who opposed his disastrous war 20 years ago remain cancelled across most of the media. Why? Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it.The main lesson from Afghanistan is that the ‘war on terror” does not work | Mary KaldorRead moreAny fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.” The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”. Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul. The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? Why do they love bombs and bullets so much, and diplomacy so little? Why do they take such evident delight in striking a pose atop a heap of bodies, before quietly shuffling away when things go wrong?An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment I began to hate the industry I work for. In 1987, I was producing a current affairs programme for the BBC World Service. It was a slow news day, and none of the stories gave us a strong lead for the programme. Ten minutes before transmission, the studio door flew open and the editor strode in. He clapped his hands and shouted: “Great! 110 dead in Sri Lanka!” News is spectacle, and nothing delivers spectacle like war.Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity. The Sun was running photos of topless teenagers on Page 3; the Daily Mail ruined women’s lives with its Sidebar of Shame; extreme sexism, body shaming and attacks on feminism were endemic.Those of us who argued against the war possessed no prophetic powers. I asked the following questions in the Guardian not because I had any special information or insight, but because they were bleeding obvious. “At what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?” But even asking such things puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion.You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
TopicsAfghanistanOpinionSouth and Central AsiaUS politicsTony BlairGeorge BushcommentReuse this content More
OpinionAfghanistanThe Guardian view on the G7’s great game: the Taliban rules in KabulEditorialOrdinary Afghans will pay the highest price for the west’s defeated ambitions Tue 24 Aug 2021 14.01 EDTLast modified on Tue 24 Aug 2021 14.58 EDTIt speaks volumes about the world today that a US president was more worried about the Taliban looking weak than about his western allies. Britain, France and Germany asked Joe Biden to continue evacuating civilians from Kabul past his self-imposed deadline of 31 August. But the US rejected these requests. Mr Biden wanted to end the chaotic TV scenes from Afghanistan that hurt his domestic poll ratings. But he also accepted that Kabul’s new rulers could not afford to look weak in front of their rival Isis, which is looking for an opportunity to embarrass its Taliban peer.The west’s airlift will therefore be over by next Tuesday. It is the Afghan people who will pay the highest price for the west’s defeated ambitions for their country. They now face living under Taliban rule for a second time. There is no guarantee that a grinding civil war is over. The scale of the west’s failure is not just that the world’s biggest economies will almost certainly fail to evacuate all those who were employed by its armies and diplomats. It is that we have let down a generation of urban Afghans, especially women, who grew up believing that their lives would be better than their parents’.Afghanistan faces a series of crises that would tax the most able technocrats. Yet at the country’s helm is the world’s most obscurantist leadership. Covid has a long way to run in Afghanistan, but only 2% of the population has been vaccinated. The Taliban struggle with the idea of female doctors working in hospitals, let alone how to tackle coronavirus. A drought has caused famine in rural parts of the country, but Afghanistan’s new rulers see humanitarian work as the preserve of charities rather than the state.The Taliban have no experience of legislating within a sophisticated political and legal framework, especially one of the kind modelled on western democracies. When they last ran the country, a cash economy did not exist. In the Afghan central bank, more than two decades ago, the Taliban installed military commanders. One died on the battlefield while still the bank’s governor.The west’s economic model for Afghanistan was, at best, a work in progress. The country has become dependent on international assistance, while poverty rates have increased from a third of the population to more than a half. Unless something extraordinary happens, foreign aid will dry up, leaving the Taliban not only unable to pay for government salaries but also without the resources to cover Afghanistan’s import bill. With the US refusing to hand over Kabul’s dollar reserves, the Afghan currency is likely to collapse in value, sparking a price spiral. Inflation and scarcity are not exactly solid foundations on which to base the stability of a regime.One cannot import development, only encourage it from within. Two Asian countries that have risen by throwing off outside rule – Vietnam and Bangladesh – show that it is possible to wean a country off foreign aid in a substantial way by creating an industrial base. The new Kabul regime is more likely to fall back on opium production, confirming its global pariah status while further diminishing the nation’s productive capacity.Afghanistan’s complexity – its patchwork of ethnicities, traditions and minimal governance – makes it hard to understand. The G7 might be able to use a carrot-and-stick approach with the Taliban. It could offer cash in return for the group respecting human rights or threaten sanctions if Kabul breaks promises. The world, ultimately, will have to adjust to American interest in Afghanistan assuming more conventional proportions. Washington, in the future, will monitor jihadist threats from afar and seek to preserve political balance in Kabul. What has disappeared is the latest attempt to impose a new Afghan society on top of an old one.TopicsAfghanistanOpinionTalibanJoe BidenSouth and Central AsiaCoronavirusUS politicsForeign policyeditorialsReuse this content More
Joe BidenBiden: Afghanistan evacuations would always have been ‘hard and painful’President defends US exit but makes changes to airlift effort at Kabul airport after criticism over deaths and chaotic scenes
Civil war ‘unavoidable’ if Taliban won’t talk – opposition leader
Martin Pengelly in New York and agencies@ More
