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US militaryTop US general says Afghan collapse can be traced to Trump-Taliban dealThe Doha agreement, signed in February 2020, set a date for the US to fully withdraw troops by May 202101:04A More
AfghanistanBlame-shifting over US withdrawal ignores deeper failings in AfghanistanAnalysis: Senators’ questions to military leadership a contest in sharing out responsibility for failures Julian Borger in WashingtonTue 28 Sep 2021 18.52 EDTLast modified on Tue 28 Sep 2021 19.02 EDTThe deeply partisan US Congress is rarely a conducive place for national introspection and Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal did not provide an exception.In the midst of the point-scoring and blame-shifting on display in the senators’ questions to the nation’s military leadership, it was clear that it was a contest to apportion shares in failure.And behind the debacle of the pullout that left tens of thousands of vulnerable Afghans behind, there were fleeting references to the far deeper failure of the preceding two decades – a reckoning that has only just begun for the Pentagon and the US foreign policy establishment.US Afghanistan withdrawal a ‘logistical success but strategic failure’, Milley saysRead moreFor obvious reasons, the Republicans on the armed services committee sought to keep the focus on the past eight months, accusing Joe Biden of surrendering to terrorists, throwing in occasional demands for the immediate resignation of the three military leaders sitting before them: the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, the head of Central Command, Gen Kenneth McKenzie and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin.The three witnesses, nudged from time to time by the Democrats, would occasionally point out that the surrender in question truly began in February 2020, with the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban in Doha.In return for a US withdrawal by 1 May this year, the Taliban agreed to seven conditions, but as Gen Milley pointed out, they only stuck to one of them: not to attack the departing Americans. Every other undertaking, such as entering into good-faith negotiations with Kabul and breaking ties with al-Qaida, the Taliban had reneged on. But Trump nonetheless sought to accelerate the withdrawal, at one point demanding it be completed by January.The Republicans barely mentioned the Doha agreement, preferring to frame the withdrawal as Biden’s original idea. It was hardly surprising. Over the past four years, the party has become accustomed to cognitive dissonance. The one backhanded Republican reference to Doha came from Thom Tillis who asked why Biden had stuck to Trump’s bankrupt deal.“I don’t buy the idea that this president was bound by a decision made by a prior president,” Senator Tillis said. “This was not a treaty. And it was clearly an agreement where the Taliban were not living up to it. President Biden could have come in, reasserted conditions and completely changed the timeline.”The answer the White House has given is that the Doha agreement gave the Taliban considerable momentum, boosting their morale, destroying Afghan government self-confidence, and freeing 5,000 Taliban fighters. Reneging on the deal by a new administration would have meant a return to war with far higher stakes, and probably tens of thousands of soldiers.Milley, McKenzie and Austin, however, took a different route in their testimony. They confirmed that in the policy of review in February, March and April, they had advocated retaining a small force of about 2,500.They were not questioned on how such a remnant could have withstood a resumption of direct attacks from an invigorated Taliban. Instead the focus of many of the exchanges centred around Biden’s baffling insistence in an ABC News interview on 19 August that he had received no such advice from his military advisers.The three witnesses tried to get around this awkwardness by saying that while they had believed a small force should have been retained, they could not possibly disclose the nature of their advice to the president.Asked by Senator Tom Cotton if Biden had been speaking the truth, Austin could only squirm and insist the president was “an honest and forthright man”.In his opening statement Austin had sought forlornly to widen the focus from the last few weeks of the US presence in Afghanistan to the preceding two decades and warned: “We need to consider some uncomfortable truths.”Mismatch of mindsets: why the Taliban won in AfghanistanRead more“Did we have the right strategy? Did we have too many strategies?” he asked. So much faith had been put in nation-building that the sudden collapse of the army and the government, and the panicked flight of President Ashraf Ghani “took us all by surprise”. “It would be dishonest to claim otherwise,” Austin said.Milley said the US military would be trying to learn the lessons of the Afghan failure for a long time to come, but he outlined some of his initial thoughts.One of his lessons, the general said, was not to give the enemy a fixed date for your departure as the Doha deal had done, but base it on a set of conditions. Another of Milley’s conclusions was “don’t Americanise the war” and don’t try to build another country’s army as the mirror image of US forces.But as Milley himself conceded, these were lessons that were supposed to have been learned in Vietnam. The Biden White House had been anxious to avoid parting scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975 but that is exactly what happened, in part because those lessons had been forgotten.The deeper question – never likely to be answered, or even asked, in the bearpit of Congress – is why the US has suffered from such recurrent amnesia each time it has gone off to war.TopicsAfghanistanUS CongressJoe BidenDonald TrumpRepublicansDemocratsTalibananalysisReuse this content More
Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan have a complex relationship. Their ties date back to the 19th century when Afghanistan became the first Muslim country to recognize the second Saudi state of 1824 to 1891. In 1930, Ibn Saud recognized King Nadir Shah’s rule in Afghanistan, in 1932, the two countries signed their first friendship agreement, and in 1950, King Zahir Shah’s visit to Saudi Arabia was commemorated on a Saudi stamp.
Ties over the following decades remained close. This was not so much because of Saudi geopolitical interests in Afghanistan, but rather how the country affected Saudi Arabia’s relations with Iran and Pakistan, a major rival and an important ally of the kingdom respectively.
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The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 marked the summit of Saudi influence. In coordination with Pakistan and the United States, the Saudis famously supported the mujahideen and also assisted many Afghan refugees. Throughout the 1980s, the kingdom exercised direct interference over various Islamist groups in Afghanistan and many Saudis traveled there to fight the Soviets.
After the Soviet Union departed in 1989 and throughout the subsequent civil war in Afghanistan, the Saudis continued their role of manipulating Afghan politicians and factions, using their petrodollars and religious influence on behalf of the US, with mixed results. In 1993, all of the Afghan mujahideen factions signed a peace agreement in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, but that failed to stop the conflict.
Saudi Ties With the Taliban
Following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, some commentators have encouraged the Saudis to try to play the religious card again. In June, Muslim scholars from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia signed a “declaration of peace” in Mecca, which Arab News described as a “historic, landmark event on the path toward reconciliation between warring factions.” But the Taliban rejected the move — which, in any event, had no impact on peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government — as a theatrical attempt to steal the diplomatic limelight from Qatar using Islamic mercenaries.
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Saudi influence over the Taliban began with funding hardline religious schools, or madrassas, in Pakistan where the movement started. It effectively ended in 1996 when the Taliban first took over Afghanistan. At the end of the 1990s, Saudi citizens were officially barred from giving money to any charity that was not state-approved, which meant Saudi public funding for the Taliban was largely cut off, except for a few individuals acting without the explicit knowledge of the government. A 2013 research paper by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs stated that Saudi “fundraisers for the Taliban … are believed to extensively exploit networks and use old mechanisms dating back to the times of Saudi cooperation with mujahedeen and Taliban functionaries.”
When the Taliban last ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries to officially recognize their government; Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates were the other two. This was not because the Saudis supported the Taliban regime, but rather because they were looking for a way to grease the wheels for an approach by Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, to persuade the Taliban to extradite Osama bin Laden, the Saudi leader of al-Qaeda.
The Saudis calculated that by recognizing the Taliban government, they could win influence as they had done in the past with other factions and warlords. But in 1998, when Prince Turki traveled to Afghanistan with a delegation of Muslim figures, the former Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, turned him down.
The Saudi View of the Taliban
The House of Saud now faces a disconcerting moment over Afghanistan, not least because like the former Afghan government, the royal family depends on the US for protection against external enemies and internal threats.
In a report by Wikistrat about the implications of the Taliban takeover on Saudi Arabia, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, comments: “Questions are likely to be mounting in Riyadh about the sincerity and the reliability of US security guarantees which themselves have been a matter of considerable uncertainty since the September 2019 attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure.” He adds that the “sudden abandonment of Afghan partners, spelled out clinically and coldly in [Joe] Biden’s televised address, may resonate strongly among US regional partners for whom President [Barack] Obama’s perceived abandonment of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 set in motion a questioning of US motivations that then continued into the Trump era.”
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Neil Quilliam, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House, continues in the same Wikistrat report: “The Taliban leadership will likely begin a campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the Al Saud and appeal directly to the Saudi population to challenge the ruling family’s authority.” He adds that the “nature of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is a cause for concern in Saudi Arabia. President Biden’s speech about the withdrawal, wherein he noted that remaining in Afghanistan no longer constitutes a vital interest, has also sent shockwaves through the Saudi leadership.”
The Taliban may turn on Saudi Arabia in the media war. Transnational jihadist groups like al-Qaeda could also threaten the Saudis from Afghanistan again. But as Sami Hamdi explained in the Arab Digest podcast, there are reasons why Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman might benefit from the situation in Afghanistan in terms of finding a renewed utility toward the US. A foreign diplomat in Riyadh, quoted by Reuters, predicted that the kingdom will take a pragmatic approach. “The Saudis have a historical relationship with Afghanistan and will eventually have to accept the Taliban [again] … They have no other option,” he said.
In 2019, Jalaluddin Shinwari, the former Taliban deputy minister of justice, told the New York Times: “What [we] are saying to Americans is this: You have accepted Saudi Arabia, and we won’t do more than their basic code — retribution for murder, chop off the hand for robbing. If you have accepted Saudi, what’s wrong with us being another? The rest will be your priorities: aid, friendship, economic relations.”
The US Would Never Pull Out of Saudi Arabia
The Taliban can dream of a relationship with the US akin to that which the Saudis enjoy. Yet that relationship is completely different from whatever ties the US has with Afghanistan. The United States would never pull out of Saudi Arabia the way it did from Afghanistan, not only because of hydrocarbons — although with the Middle East still providing around 31% of world oil production and 16% of global natural gas supply, this remains an important factor. Nor is American support just about Israel’s security — although the US and its Western allies certainly wish to ensure this, and they are ready to work with any Arab regime, particularly Saudi Arabia, that is ready to officially recognize Israel on US terms.
The main reason the US can never pull out of Saudi Arabia is because of the unthinkable consequences of losing Saudi control of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina to al-Qaeda or another jihadist movement. That is why US support for the Saudis remains solid despite misgivings on both sides.
*[This article was originally published by Arab Digest, a partner organization of Fair Observer.]
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Those were heady days in the US stock market. I would wake up by 5 am and watch CNBC before the stock market opened for trading at 6:30 am Pacific time. It was no different on the morning of September 11, 2001. Little did I know that catastrophic things were about to happen that would change the world.
At 8:45 am Eastern time, an American Airlines flight had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. Within minutes, CNBC stopped discussing stocks and started covering the incident, which, at that moment, no one knew if it was an anomalous accident or an attack of some kind.
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Three minutes after 9 am Eastern, as I watched incredulously at the events unfolding, I saw a United Airlines passenger aircraft fly right into the south tower of the twin towers. In under an hour, the south tower collapsed, resulting in a massive cloud of dust and smoke. By now, there was no doubt that America was under attack.
“We will remember the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing,” said President George W. Bush in an address to Congress on September 20. Images from that Tuesday morning are still etched in my memory, happening, as it were, just nine days after my second child was born.
In all, 2,996 people of 78 nationalities lost their lives in four coordinated attacks conducted by al-Qaeda using hijacked commercial, civilian airliners as their weapons, making 9/11 the second-biggest attack on American soil — second only to the genocidal assault on Native Americans committed by the nation’s immigrant settlers.
Operation Enduring Freedom: America’s War on Terror
Addressing the nation the following day, Bush called the attacks “more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.” He promised that “the United States of America will use all our resources to conquer this enemy.” The president went on to assure Americans that this “battle will take time and resolve, but make no mistake about it, we will win.”
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Twenty years later, the US has left Afghanistan and Iraq in a chaotic mess. The question remains: Did the United States win the war on terror the Bush administration launched in 2001? This was a war that has cost more than $6.4 trillion and over 801,000 lives, according to Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
In October 2001, the US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government that had harbored al-Qaeda. Soon after, al-Qaeda militants had been driven into hiding. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attack and leader of al-Qaeda, was killed 10 years later in a raid conducted by US forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In a shrewd move, Bush had left himself room to take down Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein, using an overarching definition for the war on terror. In his address to Congress on September 20, Bush also stated: “Our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
True to his words, in 2003, the United States and its allies invaded Iraq under the premise that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Bush settled his score with Hussein, ensuring he was captured, shamed and subsequently executed in 2006.
Despite reducing al-Qaeda to nothing and killing bin Laden, despite wrecking Iraq and having its leader executed, it is impossible to say that the US has won the war on terror. All that Washington has managed to do is to trade the Islamic State (IS) group that swept through Syria and Iraq in 2014 for al-Qaeda, giving a new identity to an old enemy. Following the US and NATO pullout from Afghanistan last month, the Taliban, whom America drove out of power in 2001, are back in the saddle. In fact, the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan has been so swift, so precise and so comprehensive that the international community is in a shock, questioning the timing and prudence of the withdrawal of troops.
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Setting an expectation for how long the war or terror was likely to last, the secretary of defense under the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld, remarked in September 2001 that “it is not going to be over in five minutes or five months, it’ll take years.” Rumsfeld, who christened the campaign Operation Enduring Freedom, was prescient, as the war enters its third decade in a never-ending fight against terrorism.
The Winners and Losers
Ironically, Operation Enduring Freedom has only resulted in an enduring loss of American freedom, one step at a time. I still remember that I had walked up to the jet bridge and received my wife as she deplaned from a flight in 1991. Another time, when she was traveling to Boston from San Francisco, I was allowed to enter the aircraft and help her get settled with her luggage, along with our 1-year-old. It is inconceivable to be allowed to do such a thing today, and I would not be surprised if readers question the veracity of my personal experience. In many ways, al-Qaeda has succeeded in stripping Americans of the sense of freedom they have always enjoyed.
More than Americans, the biggest losers in this tragic war are Iraqis and Afghans, particularly the women. Afghan women, who had a brief respite from persecution under the Taliban’s strict Islamic laws and human rights abuses, are back to square one and justifiably terrified of their future under the new regime. The heart-wrenching scenes from Kabul airport of people trying to flee the country tell us about how Afghans view the quality of life under the Taliban and the uncertainty that the future holds.
To its east, the delicate balance of peace — if one could characterize the situation between India and Pakistan as peaceful — is likely to be put to the test as violence from Afghanistan spreads. To its north in Tajikistan, there isn’t much love lost between Tajiks and the Taliban. Tajikistan’s president, Emomali Rahmon, has refused to recognize the Taliban government, and Tajiks have promised to join anti-Taliban militia groups, paving the way for continued unrest and violence in Central Asia.
If History Could be Rewritten
In 2001, referring to Islamist terrorists, Bush asked the rhetorical question, “Why do they hate us?” He tried to answer it in a speech to Congress: “They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”
Islamic fundamentalists couldn’t give two hoots about a form of government or a people’s way of life thousands of miles away. The real answer to Bush’s question lies deeply buried in US foreign policy. America’s steadfast support of Israel and its refusal to recognize the state of Palestine is the number one reason for it to become the target of groups like al-Qaeda and IS.
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America’s ill-conceived response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 during the Cold War led to the creation of al-Qaeda. It was with US funds and support that the anti-Soviet mujahideen fought America’s proxy war with the Soviets. Without US interference, al-Qaeda may never have come into existence.
During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the US bolstered Saddam Hussein by backing his regime against the Iranians. When Hussein became too ambitious for America’s comfort and invaded Kuwait in 1990, George H.W. Bush engaged Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. The US motive at that time was primarily to protect its oil interests in Kuwait.
The US created its own nemesis in Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and spent $6 trillion to kill them. In the process, US leaders have reduced Iraq and Afghanistan to shambles and created a new monster in the Islamic State.
Sadly, history can never be rewritten. The US has proved time and again that its involvement in the Middle East and Muslim world is aimed at advancing its own political interests. The only question that remains is: Can the US adopt a policy that would not aggravate the situation and, over time, deescalate it, without creating yet another Hussein or bin Laden? Without a radically different approach, Operation Enduring Freedom is doomed to endure forever, costing trillions of dollars each decade.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Yahoo News Senior Editor Mike Bebernes asks the big question on everyone’s mind after the American debacle in Afghanistan: “Does the U.S. have any real leverage over the Taliban?” After summarizing the immediate political background of the topic, he compares the speculative answers of a variety of pundits.
Bebernes distinguishes between what he calls optimists, who “say the U.S. has enormous leverage to hold the Taliban to their commitments,” and the pessimists, who apparently believe that the interests of the two countries have so little in common that it isn’t worth bothering about the concerns of such savage people. In other words, as Donnie Brasco would say, “Forget about it!”
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The optimists typically cite the weakness of the Afghan economy and the problems the Taliban will face without US cooperation. Others think that a common concern with fanatical terrorist groups may create an opportunity for mutual understanding. Bebernes suggests that the Taliban government is likely to “seek support in combating its own terror threat from groups like [the Islamic State in Khorasan Province], which some experts believe will create another point of leverage for the U.S.”
One of the pessimists appears to believe that, as in the Cold War, there may become what General Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove” would have called a “leverage gap” between the US and Russia or China. “Other world powers could undercut America’s leverage.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Leverage:
The measure of the power of a state with imperial ambitions over the life and death of populations beyond its borders
Contextual Note
The trauma Americans experienced after Saigon, nearly half a century ago, and Kabul today has provoked what might be called the first “leverage crisis” in US history. For more than two centuries, the United States has carved out, largely unimpeded, its areas of influence in various parts of the world. Areas of influence eventually evolved into “spheres of influence.”
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Following World War II, American strategists realized they could conquer, economically if not politically, the great sphere itself, the earthly globe. The globalization of what was originally the US version of Europe’s capitalist economy, along with a reinforced ideology thanks to thinkers from the University of Chicago, led every strategist within Washington’s Beltway to assume that the globe itself could become America’s hegemonic domain.
Exercising geopolitical and economic hegemony required two things: physical presence — provided essentially by multinational firms and American military bases — and a toolbox of influence, which could take the form alternatively of overt and covert military action or economic sanctions. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US State Department has wielded those tools with a sense of ever-increasing impunity as it proceeded to intimidate both its allies and nations that refused to acknowledge their tributary status with regard to US influence. For the past four decades, the US has relied on either warfare — invasion, occupation and bombing campaigns, unlimited in time and scope — or increasingly severe economic sanctions to reaffirm what was officially formulated as influence, but exercised with a spirit of hegemonic control.
The debacle in Afghanistan reveals a deeper trouble at the core of strategic decision-making in Washington. The new emphasis on the concept of leverage can be read as an admission that the toolbox to manage a sphere of influence has lost much of its efficacy. For decades, the idea of applying and reinforcing influence dominated Washington’s strategic thinking. It is now being replaced by the much more fragile idea of exercising leverage. Both the State Department and the media pundits appear puzzled about what that might mean.
The concept of leverage comes from the field of mechanics. It describes the function of a lever. “Levers convert a small force applied over a long distance to a large force applied over a small distance.” Twenty years of yet another futile, expensive and demonstrably stupid war appears to have taught Washington that it no longer has the control over distance that it formerly believed it had. Its wasteful actions have also diminished its force.
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Making leverage work in mechanics requires some careful analysis, preparation and effective execution. These are efforts the strategists, planners and decision-makers, convinced of the indomitable force of their influence, have consistently failed to carry out in a competent way. Could it be too late for them to learn the art of leverage? Or is the very fact that they are now obliged to think in terms of leverage rather than influence so humiliating an experience that they will fail to engage?
This may be the occasion for US President Joe Biden to leverage the vaunted “power of our example” rather than the “example of our power” that he so regularly mentions in his speeches. That would require some real geopolitical creativity. And does he really believe that the US could live up to that standard? Few commentators have remarked that Biden, true to his own tradition, plagiarized that line from Evan Augustine Peterson III, J.D., who originally used it in 2005 to condemn the Iraq war that Biden had so forcefully promoted as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Historical Note
In 1823, President James Monroe promulgated the Monroe Doctrine that continues to this day to dominate US relations with the entire American continent. It became a permanent feature of the mindset of US strategists, who without a trace of tragic irony routinely consider Latin America in its entirety, right down to the Tierra del Fuego, as Washington’s “backyard.” Peter Hakim, a senior fellow of the Inter-American Dialogue, in a Foreign Affairs in 2007 article with the title, “Is Washington Losing Latin America?” dared to express the feelings not only of the US political class, but also those of the USA’s neighbors. “Perhaps what most troubles Latin Americans is the sense that Washington just does not take the region seriously and still considers it to be its own backyard,” he wrote.
In 1823, Latin America’s population consisted of three broad socio-cultural and ethnic components: indigenous people who occupied most of the mountainous interior; descendants of Iberian Europeans (Spanish and Portuguese) who, following their 15th and 16th-century conquests, dominated the political and economic structures; and imported African slaves (primarily in Brazil). All three were as distant from the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture of the US as anyone could imagine. These were the populations President Monroe wanted to “protect” from hostile action by European powers.
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Through its own expansion justified in the name of “manifest destiny,” the US had demonstrated how it would deal with indigenous Americans. Primarily through genocidal warfare. It demonstrated its attitude toward Africans, deemed useful purely for economic exploitation as slaves. As for the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking populations who created the culture that prevailed across all the coastal regions of Latin America, they belonged at best to the category of second-class Europeans. The fact that the majority were mestizos (mixed-race) defined them irrevocably as third-class. At least they could thank their hybrid status for being spared the fate of the true indigenous, who could at any moment, even in recent times, be subjected to genocidal treatment.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt refined the Monroe Doctrine by adding the Roosevelt Corollary. It “stated that in cases of flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin American country, the United States could intervene in that country’s internal affairs.” If during the 19th the Monroe Doctrine functioned mainly as a barrier to European incursion, by the beginning of the 20th century, the US had come to understand the value for its burgeoning capitalist economy of controlling what came to become a continental sphere of influence. Controlling meant having the power to organize the economy of the countries under its influence.
Following the Second World War and the collapse of nearly all the vestiges of European colonization, the US discovered that the entire globe could potentially become its sphere of influence. Some have called the period of the Cold War the Pax Americana, simply because the standoff with the Soviet Union never became a hot war between the two massively armed superpowers. But throughout the period there were proxy wars, clandestine operations and regime change campaigns galore that meant the heat was never really turned down.
What a comedown it must be today to have to debate how to exercise leverage.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
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The US special representative, Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as the Bush administration’s ambassador to Afghanistan and later to the United Nations, has delivered his post-mortem on America’s two-decade-long war in Afghanistan. On August 30, he tweeted: “Our war in Afghanistan is over. Our brave Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Airmen served with distinction and sacrifice to the very end. They have our enduring gratitude and respect.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Distinction:
Blind obedience, which, according to the place and time, may turn out to be obedience to strategically blind politicians
Contextual Note
The idea of “distinction” derives from the notion that some people achieve a status that distinguishes them from their peers, placing them on a superior level. The expression “serve with distinction” in the armed forces is a time-honored cliché, whose meaning no one questions. Any individual who accepts the conditions of military service that imply the risk of losing one’s life at any given point in time automatically earns the right to be “distinguished” from the rest of humanity. Ordinary people do everything in their daily lives to reduce or eliminate risk, especially direct risks to their survival or well-being. The instinct for survival makes all humans indistinguishable. Those who engage in actions that may compromise their survival are clearly distinguished from the rest of humanity.
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Not all service personnel are exposed to battleground conditions. Some, exercising specialized tasks, never encounter them. But all members of the military implicitly accept to participate in operations commanded by their superiors with the knowledge that their survival may be in play.
Khalilzad predictably trots out the cliché but then extends it by adding “sacrifice” to “distinction.” Some may see this as unintentionally ironic. This could include Lieutenant Colonel Stu Scheller, who has vociferously clamored for accountability by military and political leaders. Over a span of 20 years, urged on by the Pentagon, three US presidents have sent their citizens abroad as sacrificial victims to the god of war they honored, if not worshipped. The belief that Ares, Mars or Týr — or indeed a god of war by any name — might require the ritual of animal sacrifice, let alone human sacrifice, would be universally mocked today. But Khalilzad reminds us that the tradition has survived in our patriotic values.
NBC’s distinguished Middle East correspondent, Richard Engel, thinks the sacrifice should be continued. “Who is going to go in now?” he asks. What power is going to go in and undo them?” Like many Americans, Engel criticizes President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. That country now finds itself under the control of what Engel persists in calling “the enemy.” If the war is over, the notion of enemy should disappear, even if a renewal of the state of war remains possible.
The Taliban seem to have understood that. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid appealed to the US to develop peaceful relations. “We have communication channels with them,” he explained, “and we expect them to reopen their embassy in Kabul and we also want to have trade relations with them.”
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the safety that cooperation has provided, but he appeared uncommitted to exploring the development of peaceful relations between the two nations. He saw no need for an embassy in Kabul. “For the time being,” he explained, “we will use this post in Doha to manage our diplomacy with Afghanistan, including consular affairs, administering humanitarian assistance, and working with allies, partners, and regional and international stakeholders to coordinate our engagement and messaging to the Taliban.”
According to Blinken, the US will politely discuss with the Taliban from afar the time it takes to evacuate those still stranded in the country whom the US believes deserve evacuation. Once that is accomplished, the US will most likely apply the opposite of the Taliban’s wish to see a US embassy in Kabul and new trade relations. The more predictable course of action, similar to the one applied to Cuba for the past 60 years, would be an aggravated economic war consisting of sanctions and blockades.
In fact, the campaign to starve Afghanistan has already begun. The United Nations warns that emergency food reserves are likely to run out within a month and that “starvation could soon compound the humanitarian crisis convulsing Afghanistan.” At the same time, The New York Times reports that “Washington has frozen Afghan government reserves, and the International Monetary Fund has blocked its access to emergency reserves.“
Historical Note
In a different tweet, Zalmay Khalilzad affirmed that the Taliban were now facing what he called “a test” and then asked two rhetorical questions. “Can they lead their country to a safe & prosperous future where all their citizens, men & women, have the chance to reach their potential?” was his first question. This seems reasonable enough, given the promises the Taliban have made to be more open than in the past to normalized international relations and human rights. Reasonable leaders in a reasonable world should encourage them to prove their capacity to honor their own promises. But Khalilzad’s second question reveals how hollowly rhetorical the first one was. “Can Afghanistan,” he asks, “present the beauty & power of its diverse cultures, histories, & traditions to the world?”
That is so obviously distant from even an enlightened Taliban policy that asking it can only be seen as hypocrisy. Khalilzad clearly anticipates blaming them for their failure to live up to Western ideals. This is designed to serve as a pretext for a future campaign to punish the impudent Taliban for winning a war not just against Americans — the Vietnamese had already done that — but against NATO and the entire “rules-based” coalition of nations that followed the US into the quagmire of Afghanistan.
The campaign by corporate US media to humiliate and eventually add to the suffering of a Taliban-run Afghanistan has already begun. In the same interview cited above, Richard Engel follows up his implicit appeal to a brave nation other than the US to take over the task abandoned by the Americans (“to go in and undo them”) with an observation that sits oddly with his acknowledgment of the definitive American retreat.
“It will be a challenge,” Engel tells his American audience, “to bring the Taliban into the international community. But that is the challenge that is facing us for the sake of the Afghan people.” He doesn’t explain who the “us” is who are now faced with the challenge. Is it the US, its traditional allies (Europe, Israel and the Gulf countries), or perhaps the entire human race, who he assumes adheres to the values promulgated by the US?
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His question is nevertheless intriguing. To the extent that Engel supposes that the US should be the one “to bring the Taliban into the international community,” two opposing policies are worth considering. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call them the carrot and the stick. The carrot would be to let 20 years of bygones be bygones and respond to the Taliban’s overture by saying: Yes, let’s push cooperation to the hilt and make something out of our past mistakes.
The stick would be to stoke a rapid deterioration of economic and social conditions while offering clandestine support to any and all forces of opposition within Afghanistan — the policy the US pursued under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, aimed at overthrowing an independent, socialist-leaning government that they feared would be magnetically attracted to the Soviet Union. The allies the US cultivated in the 1980s were the mujahadeen, whom the US trained in the fine art of what is deemed “good” terrorism, designed to destabilize unfriendly governments.
Engel ends his analysis by comparing the Taliban-run Afghanistan to a “hole in the map” of the region. He expresses his belief that the sudden absence of US troops will “suck in other countries around it” into what he calls a “vortex” of instability. The consequences of the US retreat for Pakistan and India are difficult to measure, to say nothing of the virtual alliance between Israel and the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, who counted on an abiding US military presence to continue their aggressive opposition to Iran. In any case, it is likely that the future will see less distinction but continued sacrifice.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Americans have been shocked by reports of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban, whose militants swept through Afghanistan and returned to power on August 15. This was followed by a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (IS-KP) that killed at least 170 people, including 13 US troops. Some eyewitnesses told the BBC that “significant numbers” of those killed were shot dead by American and foreign forces.
Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the US Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan central bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government led by the Taliban of funds it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services. Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
Afghanistan: A Final Nail in the Coffin of American Foreign Policy
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The US and other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding aid and recognition gave them “very considerable leverage — economic, diplomatic and political” over the Taliban.
Western politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some power in the new government and that Western influence and interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return. This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros, but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.
US Spending in Afghanistan
To read or listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its allies’ 20-year war in Afghanistan was a benign and beneficial effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide health care, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban. The reality is quite different and not so hard to understand.
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The United States spent $2.26 trillion on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric military spending to maintain the US-led military occupation, drop tens of thousands of bombs and missiles, pay private contractors and transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years.
Since the United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for US soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq already amount to over $350 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for both of those US-led wars could eventually reach another trillion dollars over the next 40 years.
So, what about “rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated $144 billion for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security forces” that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent between 2008 and 2017 was, as per Al Jazeera, documented as “waste, fraud and abuse” by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Corruption
The crumbs left over, less than 2% of total US spending on Afghanistan, amount to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the Afghan people in economic development, health care, education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid. But, as in Iraq, the government the US installed in Afghanistan was notoriously corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the world.
Western readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in the country, as opposed to a particular feature of the US-led occupation, but this is not the case. TI noted that “it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels.” A 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned that “corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous administrations.” Those administrations would include the Taliban government that US and NATO invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist governments that were overthrown by the US-supported precursors of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they had made in education, health care and women’s rights.
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A 2010 report by Anthony H. Cordesman, a Pentagon official under Ronald Reagan, entitled “How America Corrupted Afghanistan,” chastised the US government for throwing gobs of money into that country with virtually no accountability. The New York Times reported in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with US dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.
Corruption also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up as the successes of the occupation, like education and health care. The education system has been riddled with schools, teachers and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are stocked with fake, expired or low-quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil servants like teachers earning only one-tenth the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and contractors.
Rooting out corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to the primary US goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or extending its puppet Afghan government’s control. As TI reported, the US “has intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information and cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling grievances against the Afghan government and channelling material support to the insurgency.”
Poverty and Freezing Funds
The endless violence of the US-led occupation and the corruption of the Afghan government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in rural areas where three-quarters of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of Afghanistan also contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.
Well before the current crisis, the number of Afghans reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018 Gallup poll found the lowest levels of self-reported “well-being” that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record levels of misery, but also unprecedented hopelessness about their future.
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Despite some gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan girls attended primary school in 2019 and only 37% of adolescent Afghan girls were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in Afghanistan is that more than 2 million children between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken families.
Yet instead of atoning for their role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty, Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and humanitarian aid that was funding three-quarters of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP.
In effect, the United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second: economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their “leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other victims of US economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran.
After pouring trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s main duty now is to help the 38 million Afghans who have not fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and trauma of the conflict that the US inflicted on them. This is coupled with a massive drought that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third wave of COVID-19.
The US should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in American banks. It should shift the $6 billion allocated for the now-defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for $1.3 billion in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.
Rethinking Its Place
Once upon a time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat Germany and Japan. The Americans then helped to rebuild them as healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s serious faults — its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries — it held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries around the world were ready to follow.
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If all the United States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to be moving on and looking at other models to follow: new experiments in popular and social democracy; a renewed emphasis on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use of military force to resolve international problems; and more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate disaster.
The US can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help to build.
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OpinionAfghanistanThe Guardian view on dealing with the Taliban: no good optionsEditorialStrategic failure has drastically reduced the west’s ability to influence the future course of events Mon 30 Aug 2021 13.30 EDTLast modified on Mon 30 Aug 2021 16.43 EDTAs the final evacuation flights leave Kabul, watched in despair by those abandoned and in peril, the lasting consequences of strategic failure must now be faced. During the Doha peace talks, American diplomats liked to talk of a process towards an inclusive political settlement that would be Afghan-led and Afghan-owned. The “process” turned out instead to be a victory procession for the Taliban. What comes now will therefore be Taliban-led and Taliban-owned. Hamstrung as a result of their own mistakes, the United States, Britain and their allies have little choice but to engage with the new reality.Belated attempts are being made to do so from a supposed position of strength. As the last British forces left Kabul at the weekend, Boris Johnson adopted a stentorian tone to warn: “If the new regime … wants diplomatic recognition or to unlock the billions currently frozen, they will have to ensure safe passage for those who wish to leave the country, to respect the rights of women and girls, [and] to prevent Afghanistan becoming again an incubator for global terror.” It seems clear that Taliban leaders hope to avoid the international pariah status of the 1990s and will soon be in desperate need of cash. Both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have suspended payments to Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, and the Afghan central bank’s reserves are frozen in the US. But the notion that, as China and Russia pursue their own agendas, the west can continue to call the shots and impose its terms is wishful thinking.Unfolding humanitarian crises will limit the scope for playing diplomatic hardball. Over the weekend it emerged that, despite the huge evacuation effort from Kabul airport, British government estimates of the number of vulnerable people left behind were far too low. There is no plan in place for what those left stranded should do now, and no route established yet for refugees to neighbouring countries. Demonstrating extraordinary negligence, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, failed even to engage with his Pakistani counterpart until a week after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. On Monday, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, began a diplomatic tour of countries bordering Afghanistan, including Pakistan, in the hope of securing refugee agreements which should have been negotiated months ago.According to a joint statement by the UK, the US and more than 90 other countries, the Taliban have given assurances that foreign nationals and Afghans with travel authorisation from other countries will be allowed to leave. This seems at odds with reports of house-to-house searches and the intimidation of those associated with the former government and western forces. But in the absence of any leverage in the country, America and its allies must simply hope that the Taliban’s calculation of their self-interest works in the west’s favour. Meanwhile, soaring food prices, prolonged drought in much of the country and the internal displacement of millions of refugees – many of them women and children – are already leading to appalling hardship as autumn and winter approach. It will be impossible to deliver to desperate Afghans the scale of humanitarian assistance required without some degree of cooperation and collaboration with the new regime.On Monday, the Kremlin called for Washington to release the Afghan central bank reserves on humanitarian grounds, while in a phone conversation with the US secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, said that the international community should engage with the Taliban and “guide it actively”. By failing to link military withdrawal to conditions on the ground, the west no longer controls the course of events. In relation to the Taliban regime it inadvertently installed, it has no good options now.TopicsAfghanistanOpinionSouth and Central AsiaUS politicsTalibanForeign policyUS foreign policyeditorialsReuse this content More
