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      Ending the US Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty

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      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.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Some Boots on the Ground Leave Odd Footprints

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      Most people consider the trillions of dollars spent by the Americans on military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq to have been a waste of money and the sign of a failed vision. When US President Joe Biden reasoned that it was time to put a stop to the spending, he claimed it had long ago achieved its most essential objectives: “to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.”

      Biden thus implicitly admitted that most of the operational objectives defined and pursued over the past two decades ended in failure. He noted that once Osama bin Laden was out of the picture, there was nothing further to accomplish in Afghanistan. “We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago,” he proudly announced, “and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since,” he complained.

      US Media Amplifies Afghan Chaos

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      Anyone who has been through Harvard Business School (HBS) and understands the basic principles of economics would recognize that there were probably better things to do with that amount of money. Hal Brands and Michael O’Hanlon, the authors of an article in Foreign Affairs, have penned an article with the title, “America Failed Its Way to Counterterrorism Success.” Neither did an MBA at HBS. Both men aimed higher, frequenting other elite universities (Stanford, Yale and Princeton), where they focused on what really matters: managing the global strategies of an expanding empire. They share a solid reputation as experts in strategic defense and are associates respectively of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and the centrist Brookings Institute. 

      Brands and O’Hanlon have teamed up to convince their public of the Leibnitzian truth that all was for the best despite the obvious fiasco. In their analysis of the profligate waste that appears on the Pentagon’s still unaudited books, they recognize but appear unconcerned by a two-decade-long failure to produce even a minimal return on investment. Thanks to their clever detective work, they believe that there is a hidden success story waiting to be told.

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      Their embarrassment with the obvious facts becomes clear in two sentences that begin respectively with the words “but” and “yet.” “But since around 2014,” they affirm, “Washington has settled on a medium-footprint model based on modest investments, particularly in special operations forces and airpower, to support local forces that do most of the fighting and dying.” In the same paragraph, they explain: “Yet the experience of the past two decades suggests that the medium-footprint strategy is still the best of bad options available to the United States.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Medium-footprint:

      In geopolitics, a size that sounds reasonable after realizing that an effort based on maximum power by a mighty nation has catastrophically failed. The virtue associated with a medium footprint follows the convincing reasoning that spending less on wasteful activities is more virtuous than spending more.

      Contextual Note

      For the past two decades, US foreign policy has accelerated the trend, influenced by McDonald’s, of supersizing everything, all in the name of security needs. But the supersized milkshake appears to have fatally slipped from every administration’s hands and has now crashed to the ground in the place it all began. President Biden’s decision has rocked the foundations of America’s belief in the efficacy of its unparalleled military might.

      Brands and O’Hanlon agree with the now commonly held opinion that the entire campaign in Afghanistan was, in terms of its stated goals, a spectacular failure. They see it as tragic overreach. But rather than applaud Biden for seeking to put an end to “unsustainably expensive military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq,” they complain that “the United States underreached by pulling back from the broader Middle East too fast and allowing old threats to reemerge.” They appear to lay the blame on all three occupants of the White House since 2014: Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. At the same time, they applaud what they see as a trend of downsizing the supersized calamities initiated by the Bush administration.

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      When the Americans put boots on the ground, the footprints they leave tend to be outrageously big and messy. Rather than simply marching forward, US military campaigns have a habit of seeking to mash into the ground everything that seems a bit foreign on their path. The authors think they can do better and applaud what they see as a trend toward a medium footprint as a form of progress. In their eyes, it may even justify all the otherwise obvious failure.

      They present the medium-footprint model as a kind of silver living in a somber and depressing cloud, daring to invoke a possible positive return on investment. “When combined with nonmilitary tools such as intelligence cooperation, law enforcement efforts, and economic aid,” they write, “this approach provides reasonably good protection at a reasonable price.” They recast the failure as a kind of research and development investment that has prepared a brighter future and will guarantee increased market share for US military domination (i.e., security).

      Historical Note

      In their audit of success and failure, Hal Brands and Michael O’Hanlon rejoice in one accomplishment: that “Washington has inflicted devastating losses on its enemies and forced them to focus more on surviving than thriving.” An honest historian would be tempted to reframe this in the following terms: Washington has inflicted devastating losses on multiple civilian populations and forced them to focus more on surviving than thriving.

      That is the obvious truth concerning people’s lives and social structures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Is this something Americans who celebrate their military as “a force for good in the world” can really rejoice in? Reducing entire populations to the struggle for survival seems a far cry from spreading democracy and defending human rights. Creating misery is an aggressive denial of human rights. It creates conditions that encourage further violations of those rights.

      Playing the imaginary role of a CEO called in to take over a failing enterprise, the authors note that thanks to their vaunted medium-footprint strategy, “the rate of expenditure has come down markedly in the last decade.” They point out that wars that “once cost as much as $200 billion a year in all” now cost “just a few billion dollars.” That is effective downsizing.

      They define the new strategy as “managing intractable problems rather than solving them or simply walking away.” In other words, the Goldilocks principle. Not too heavy, not too light. “Just right,” or, as the authors put it, “meant to be both aggressive and limited.” 

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      Could this be an example of Aristotle’s golden mean as a moral principle? In such situations, Aristotle defines an extreme to be avoided as anger, which provokes the subject “to inflict pain, and to perceive his revenge.” That was the official motivation the Bush administration adopted for its war on the Taliban in 2001. “Managing intractable problems” presumably involves taking into account all the parameters of a situation. It should include engaging in dialogue and negotiation. 

      But that is not what the authors envision. The “aggressive” side they recommend involves delegating the nasty part of war to local partners who “clear and hold terrain,” assured that they will be accompanied by the “direct use of U.S. military power — especially special operations forces, drones, and manned airpower.” Aristotle would object that that could not be thought of as managing the problem. It is simply a more complex and messier prosecution of anger.

      The authors believe this strategy worked against the Islamic State (IS), a movement that wouldn’t even have arisen without the initial “heavy footprint.” But did it work or merely seem to work? There has been a lot of seeming over the past 20 years. Last week’s attack at Kabul airport was conducted by the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, a regional affiliate of IS.

      The authors explain the purpose of their medium footprint: “to maintain the regional military footholds.” From footprint to foothold, all seems to be clear. They even imagine that such strategies pay off in the form of “deeper reform once conditions stabilized.” Can they cite any cases of reform and stabilized conditions as a result of either heavy or medium footprints? Not really, because there haven’t been any. Instead, they console themselves with this conclusion: “On the whole, the medium-footprint strategy was more sustainable and effective than anything Washington had tried before.”

      The lesser of two evils? Or simply the slower of two evils?

      *[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

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      Afghans Have Been Left at the Mercy of the Ruthless Taliban

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      On August 15, Taliban militants entered the outskirts of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. It was the worst thing that could have happened to former Afghan employees of foreign institutions, women and civil rights defenders, religious and ethnic minorities, local journalists and even ordinary people.

      Now, with the final withdrawal of US and NATO forces, nearly 38 million Afghans have been handed over to a group that has conducted suicide attacks, oppressed women and massacred minorities.

      Afghanistan: A Final Nail in the Coffin of American Foreign Policy

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      Chaotically, people packed their bags and hurried to Kabul International Airport, apparently the only way left to get out of the country. Some did not even have visas and passports, without knowing their destination. The only thing they wanted was to get as far away from Afghanistan as possible. Some Afghans boarded planes, but others were unable to get on and desperately clung to an American aircraft that was about to take off. While some managed to safely arrive in other countries, others fell from the plane. This included a 19-year-old Afghan national footballer who lost his life.

      In a matter of weeks, the Taliban have managed to dismantle an army built by the United States over the past two decades. Officially, the Afghan forces were at least four times the size of the Taliban and had greater combat capabilities. This failure was unpredictable for the Afghan people and anyone involved in Afghanistan. How is it possible for such a costly army to kneel before a relatively irregular terrorist group after receiving training from the world’s most powerful military?

      Why Did the Afghan Army Kneel?

      There are many possible reasons for this catastrophic defeat. This includes the lack of NATO air support for Afghan troops, low morale and faith in resisting the Taliban, widespread corruption in the army and among politicians, illegal deals and mass desertions. Reports indicate that some brigades and corps of the army had not fought a war against the Taliban in some provinces. This meant local forces who took up arms were on the front lines in key cities were without support from the Afghan army. Soldiers in the 209th Corps in Mazar-e-Sharif left their base without informing their allies. The local commanders in this strategic province later called the army’s withdrawal a betrayal and conspiracy.

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      Over the years, Afghanistan’s defense and security institutions have become increasingly corrupt and inefficient due to the interference of politicians. This is according to Munira Yousefzada, the former deputy defense minister. In an interview with BBC Persian, she claimed that decisions at all levels of the army were illegally taken from the Ministry of Defense and assigned to the office of Hamdullah Mohib, the national security adviser. These included critical decisions over war, intelligence, the appointment of officials, training and personnel matters. Therefore, “the Ministry of Defense had no role in the war,” she said, “and all commanders, from district commanders to commanders of corps, had to be close to Hamadullah Mohib.”

      An “Unpatriotic” Fugitive

      Ashraf Ghani, the now-former president, made the national army an incapable institution by unnecessarily dismissing and appointing personnel during his rule. The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), as the military was officially known as, was not disintegrated by the Taliban, but by the mismanagement of Afghan politicians. Ghani used his position to marginalize non-Pashtun actors from the government. When the Taliban began their operation of seizing districts, large cities and then the capital, commanders of corps and divisions surrendered one after another without putting up a fight.

      In an interview with Afghanistan International, General Yasin Zia, the head of the joint chiefs of staff in the Afghan government, said that Ghani had betrayed the soldiers by making wrong decisions and fleeing the country during a war. Mohammad Mohaqiq, the former security adviser, also told the broadcaster that the president was the main culprit in the defeat of ANDSF. For the past seven years, Mohaqiq said, Ghani was overwhelmed by the illusion of power, made wrong decisions and, upon witnessing Taliban fighters reaching Kabul, fled the country with $169 million in cash. 

      Ghani’s presidency will be remembered as one of the worst points in Afghan history. Thanks to his mismanagement and the crimes that took place during his rule, Afghans have accused Ghani of committing suspicious acts against national interests. His political opponents have long considered him as one of the biggest obstacles to peace. 

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      In particular, the president did not back down when US politicians, almost all members of the Afghan High Peace Council and even Taliban leaders gathered in Qatar and called for an interim government. In early March, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote a scathing letter to Ghani, saying the threats are too high and that a UN-led peace agreement with the Taliban should be signed. If this was not done, Blinken warned, the security situation in Afghanistan would spiral out of control. Shortly thereafter, several high-level US delegations, including Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, visited Afghanistan to speak to Ghani about reaching an agreement with the Taliban. The warnings went unheeded. 

      Can the Taliban be Trusted?

      Since seizing power, the Taliban have announced a general amnesty for all people in Afghanistan, including employees of foreign institutions. According to this, everyone has immunity. As per Taliban leaders, women can return to work by observing Islamic law. Media outlets can also operate freely, as long as they follow Islamic principles. Nevertheless, it cannot simply be concluded that the Taliban are trustworthy. In the coming weeks, it will become clearer if they are tolerant toward women, minorities and activists. 

      In 1996, the Taliban announced an amnesty as they entered Kabul and took control of Afghanistan; they ruled the country until the US-led invasion in 2001. Yet soon after, the Taliban launched a retaliatory campaign. The worst crimes against humanity took place during the Taliban’s rule. In August 1998, thousands of Hazaras, an Afghan minority, were massacred in Mazar-e-Sharif. Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid described the killing as “genocidal in its ferocity.” 

      Taliban leaders who have appeared in the media portray a more moderate regime. They speak of forming an inclusive government, tolerance toward minorities and respecting women’s rights. But this is far from the reality.

      Taliban militants are still committed to the group’s core ideology. Their fighters follow extremist thought, such as the Deobandi school and jihadi Salafism, one of the most basic principles of which is intolerance toward other Islamic sects. There have been reports of jihadists from Pakistan and other countries fighting alongside the Taliban. According to the United Nations, there are between 8,000 and 10,000 foreign fighters in Afghanistan who are either affiliated with the Taliban, al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in Khurasan Province (IS-KP).

      Afghans Are Left at the Mercy of the Taliban

      The Taliban have so far worked closely with terrorist groups operating in Central Asia and South Asia. Needless to say, this cooperation is likely to continue in the future. The Taliban’s view of religious principles is at odds with human dignity and civil rights. In particular, the Taliban’s definition of women’s rights and freedom does not apply to Afghan society.

      The group’s fighters have no faith in democracy and elections, and they are suspicious of women and minorities. Taliban leaders try to portray the group as tolerant in the media and talk about women’s rights to gain international support. In practice, their fighters on the ground believe that “women are mindless in general knowledge and religion.” 

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      The Taliban do not have a development-oriented mindset. They do not have a plan or even skilled followers to govern, and they certainly cannot manage the country’s shattered economy. A Taliban government would presumably be accompanied by widespread opium cultivation, drug trafficking and human rights violations. 

      The theory that the Taliban have changed is just an illusion. The Taliban have already begun targeted house-to-house inspections searching for Afghans who worked with US and NATO forces. There are also reports indicating that people, despite a general amnesty, have been arbitrarily persecuted publicly. Four former Afghan commanders and a relative of a Deutsche Welle journalist have reportedly been killed by Taliban fighters.

      The Taliban have not treated ethnic and religious minorities well either. Just one night after their takeover, the Taliban’s unbridled fighters destroyed a statue of Abdul Ali Mazari, a Hazara religious and national leader, in Bamiyan province where the Taliban demolished two 1,600-year-old Buddha statues in 2001. According to Amnesty International, the Taliban brutally massacred nine Hazaras in July this year after seizing the rural village of Mundarakht in the Malistan district of Ghazni province. Six of them were allegedly shot dead and three were tortured to death by Taliban fighters.

      The Taliban have no suitable personnel and capacity to run a country, and their only means of maintaining power is carrying out large-scale violence and ruling through fear. Under the Taliban, media will be censored and civilians will be forced to live like people in the dark ages. With the Taliban taking power, poverty, violence and organized repression will rage in the country. During their rule, civil rights advocates have no chance of survival.

      Afghan civilians have been left defenseless and helpless at the mercy of one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups.    

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Afghanistan: A Final Nail in the Coffin of American Foreign Policy

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      When the United States began Operation Enduring Freedom, leading its forces into Afghanistan to empower local resistance to oust the Taliban, Afghans around the world cheered in sheer jubilance. The unipolar hero that is the United States of America had come to save the day and defeat the wicked Taliban, presided over by the one-eyed tyrant Mullah Mohammad Omar. But now, after 20 years of “missteps,” “miscalculations” and “misunderstandings,” we Afghans now wonder whether we were grossly mistaken.

      The DC foreign policy community, nevertheless, has come up with predictably uncreative rebuttals to accusations of failure. We trained the Afghans wrong, the story went, ignoring the fact that Afghan soldiers have held their own for the entirety of the war. Leadership was weak, they said, ignoring the fact the US endorsed the power-sharing deal that kept those leaders in power. The Afghans couldn’t build an economy, we were told, ignoring the fact John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, had been consistently putting out reports for over a decade pointing out that the US strategy needed dramatic reimagining. There was no local support and Afghans had no will to fight, they surmised, ignoring the fact that Afghan special forces continue to defend their homeland.

      What the World Can Learn From the Events in Afghanistan

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      These excuses and reflections come as little surprise to those the United States has already abandoned: the South Vietnamese to the northern Viet Cong, the Iraqis to Iran and the Islamic State, the Kurds to the Turks, and, most notably, the American troops who had fought and sacrificed their lives in these “forever wars” to history. All were left to perish at the hands of an evil so vile that the US had no other option but to first invade, only to later leave, suggesting that maybe the evil was not so bad after all.

      Vietnam, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan: seven different administrations, Democrat and Republican. Kabul is simply the latest victim learning the valuable lesson President Joe Biden is teaching future allies by allowing Afghans to fall from the wings of departing American jets: The US will not defend you. 

      All an adversary needs to do is be consistent and not give up. Time after time we have been shown that if the resistance is stubborn enough, the US will inevitably turn its back, exclaim, “What can we say, the locals just can’t be helped!” while waiting for a politically opportune time — just long enough before any election so that constituents forget — and then buck and run.

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      China’s state-run media has already begun to propagate this message to Taiwan: The US will abandon you, maybe not in five years, maybe not in 10 or even 20, but it will abandon you eventually — and we will be here. For once, China’s propaganda departments are perhaps not wrong. The US can’t rely on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, given its non-interference principle. Japan’s self-defense forces aren’t equipped to assist. South Korea has its hands full with the north. The US Navy is not built for combat with China’s modern and flexible fleet, and there are no ideal places to base and supply consistent military engagement in Taiwan.

      Likewise, politics will always play a role in US military engagements, but would its domestic population ever stomach a hot conflict with China over an island it shares no language, culture or customs with outside of it being a democracy?

      China, on the other hand, holds the good cards. It has more ships than the US Navy. Taiwan is just 100 miles away, and the Chinese people are fanatical about reunification. And, just like the Taliban, Beijing isn’t going anywhere.

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      US Vice President Kamala Harris has proclaimed that the US will not tolerate China’s unlawful actions in the South China Sea, recently reaffirming Washington’s commitment to its allies. But will the vice president 20 years into a “forever war” with China think the same?

      It’s likely that future White House administrations will have new considerations, ones that might make a trillion-dollar war with China far less palatable to the US voter base than trillion-dollar climate change legislation to end America’s fossil fuel dependency. Then all the US foreign policy community has to do is look back and state that the failure was a result of “missteps,” “miscalculations” and “misunderstandings,” entirely forgetting that the last time these blunders were made, they vowed to learn from their mistakes, and they vowed to stand by their allies.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      US Media Amplifies Afghan Chaos

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      The Daily Devil’s Dictionary appears today in its final August weekly edition containing multiple items taken from a variety of contexts. The daily format returns next Monday.

      The Fading Horizon of US Middle East Politics

      US foreign policy has always sought effective metaphors intended to express the nation’s exceptional virtues, often framed in terms of vision, resolution, industriousness or simply noble intentions. The Afghan war was baptized, “Operation Enduring Freedom.” The war in Iraq gave us “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and “Operation New Dawn.” 

      Ever since Woodrow Wilson’s promise to “make the world safe for democracy” expressed America’s aptitude for entering wars, securing privileged access to resources, engaging in economic colonialism and intimidating uncooperative nations, slogans have served to clarify the direction of US policy. In recent years, the public has periodically learned about a “reset,” a “rebalance” or a “pivot” that announces a creative shift of perspective or intent.

      Questions on Which No One Agrees: Infrastructure, Cuba and Jobs

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      Faced with the quandary of military withdrawal from the “forever wars” inherited from the three previous administrations, the Biden team has crafted a new metaphor intended to reassure a concerned public. Following the definitive overthrow of the US-supported Afghan government and the definitive withdrawal of foreign troops, President Joe Biden made the solemn promise “to retain an over-the-horizon capacity” as the appropriate response to any attempts by the Taliban government to threaten US interests. Biden defines this as the capacity “to take them out, surgically.”

      Over the horizon:

      Belonging to an imaginary domain where everything is perfectly coordinated and clearly efficient, an update of the “over the rainbow” capacity of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz

      The Context

      As Oliver Knox pointed out in The Washington Post, that “phrase has been a staple of Biden’s rhetoric on the troop withdrawal.” If all human efforts fail, whether with soldiers or diplomats, Americans tend to believe that their superior technology will respond to every need. The same reasoning has been consistently applied to the climate crisis, which, in the interest of economic growth, will continue to worsen because at the end of the day a technology fix will miraculously ride into the frame of the movie from over the horizon to save the enterprising pioneers in the wagon train.

      What if the Taliban Were to Keep Their Promises?

      With the sudden collapse of the Afghan government, Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem declared that the war that began 20 years ago was now “over.” In its initial reaction, The New York Times agreed, summing up the event with the headline: “Kabul’s Sudden Fall to Taliban Ends U.S. Era in Afghanistan.” This calm description more appropriate to a report on a thrilling chess match made it sound as if a noble chapter of history has now been closed.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The drama that ensued led even The Times to change its tone. For the Afghans or at least the Taliban, the invader has finally been defeated. For the US, a dolorous reckoning is taking place. And while, among the confusion, the level of fear and anguish has never been higher, especially for those Afghans who cooperated with the US and the fallen government, coldly reasoning Americans (if such creatures exist) should take comfort from the promises the Taliban have made to “allow Afghans to resume daily activities and do nothing to scare civilians.”

      Naeem sought to reassure the US about Taliban 2.0. Even members of the 2001 Bush administration should be impressed, those who justified the war against Afghanistan on the grounds that the country was “harboring terrorists.” “We will not allow anyone,” Naeem insisted, “to use our lands to target anyone, and we do not want to harm others.”

      Target:

      In the domain of foreign relations, a polite synonym of kill, torture, injure and oppress with a sense of total impunity

      The Context

      What more could Americans ask for? Mission finally accomplished. If the Afghans no longer allow anyone to use their lands to target anyone else (for example, tall buildings in New York), all will be well with the world. Lower Manhattan’s traders can carry on their business in total tranquility. The Taliban leaders have even promised to improve the lives of Afghan women, as well as hinting they will tone down at least some of their traditional fanaticism. So, why is everyone so upset?

      Could it be that Americans feel destabilized by the realization, nearly half a century after the fall of Saigon, of the utter futility of building such a powerful military machine that, no matter where it is deployed, will accomplish nothing other than intimidate its own allies while producing monumental profits for the defense industry? Who doesn’t remember George W. Bush boasting about the most powerful military in the history of mankind that was “supported by the collective will of the world?”  

      Now, it is the Taliban who have seized the pen that writes the rules in Afghanistan. Despite the official promise to go easy on collaborators, US media have expressed “growing doubts about that pledge.” It leaves the impression that critics of the US withdrawal would be disappointed if no spectacular reprisals were to occur. Americans need their enemies to live up to the image they have created of them. The Times predicts that the “Taliban may indeed engage in reprisal killings, as they did when they took over in Afghanistan more than 20 years ago.” If the US defined the rules of the game through its own violence, ineptness and prevarication over two decades, the Taliban could at least demonstrate their own ability to play by those rules. Stick to the script, guys! We need your cooperation.

      There are legitimate reasons to fear the worst from a group defined by its religious fundamentalism seeking control of a chaotically divided nation of warlords and competing ethnic groups in which the idea of getting revenge on the invader and occupier motivates a lot of people. But the message today, as expressed by Abdul Qahar Balkhi from the Taliban’s Cultural Commission, is clearly different from the Taliban’s historical past. 

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      In another article, The Times mocks the very idea of the Taliban’s effort to “make nice.” This too reads like a case of futuristic schadenfreude sending the implicit message: Let’s hope they don’t succeed in making nice because our nation and its people need to remain convinced that the Taliban are evil enough to make our 20-year war on them appear justified.

      The State Department’s Philosophy of Trickle-down Sharing

      In February, Biden made a point of reassuring the nation’s European allies, who during the four years of Donald Trump’s tragicomic reign had begun to have doubts about the solidity of promises made by an American president. “Let me erase any lingering doubt,” Biden insisted, “the United States will work closely with our European Union partners and capitals across the continent, from Rome to Riga, to meet the shared challenges we face.”

      It didn’t take long for the first of such challenges to appear.

      Shared challenge:

      A crisis created by a powerful nation such as the United States, who generously offers other friendly nations the opportunity to accompany it in the experience of responding to the crisis, which will last as long as it serves the initiator’s interests, while at the same time avoiding bothering the partners with the annoyance of trying to work out collegially an appropriate and honorable solution

      The Context

      Since the end of World War II, the United States has assumed the noble responsibility of managing the foreign affairs of its largely docile allies, while at the same time finding multiple ways of disrupting the foreign affairs of rogue nations that irresponsibly refuse to have their affairs managed from Washington. In the intervening decades, this has worked quite well. It has enabled an enduring system called a “rules-based order,” whose efficiency depended on one nation having the exclusive right not just to define the rules, but also to enforce them.

      With the chaos surrounding the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the first signs are appearing that the vaunted efficiency of the rules-based order has become counterproductive. Yahoo cites Dave Keating, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, who explains that Europeans are angry “that they weren’t consulted about the withdrawal plan and were treated as an afterthought even though this was supposed to be a NATO joint endeavor.” Everyone — Americans and Europeans alike — has suddenly become aware of “the tremendous loss of money and lives spent on the NATO mission in Afghanistan over the past two decades that now seems very difficult to justify.”

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      Some observers pointed out in late 2001 that waging an open and easily extendible war to counter a specific crime by a small group of people might be “difficult to justify.” But in the rule-based order, at a time of exaggerated emotions, a firm and resolute decision by the drafter of the rules was as good as formal law and much better than moral law in redefining the rules and having everyone abide by them.

      Credibility Ratings Are the Diplomatic Equivalent of Credit Ratings

      The Washington Post understands the imperatives associated with the task of maintaining the image of an imperial power and the sacrifices it requires. Last week, following the debacle of Kabul, The Post’s editorial board explained how feasible it would have been for the US not to shamelessly abandon Afghanistan: “A small U.S. and allied military presence — capable of working with Afghan forces to deny power to the Taliban and its al-Qaeda terrorist allies, while diplomats and nongovernmental organizations nurtured a fledgling civil society — not only would have been affordable but also could have paid for itself in U.S. security and global credibility.”

      Global credibility:

      The impression retained by other nations and peoples that a superpower is ready, willing and able to subjugate any other group of people through the use of military might, technology, economic sanctions and any other appropriate means it possesses that sets it apart from the rest of humanity

      The Context

      The Post routinely supports establishment Democrats such as Biden, especially in opposition to dangerous progressives within the same party. But in this case, Jeff Bezos’ paper dared not only to criticize its hero, but even to accuse him of relying on clichés to support his reasoning. “Contrary to his and others’ cliches about ‘endless war,’ though, U.S. troops had not been in major ground operations, and had endured very modest casualties, since 2014,” The Post reports.

      The Trojan War left traumatic traces on ancient Greek civilization because it lasted what felt to its contemporaries like an eternity: 10 years. To expiate the guilt associated with that enduring drama, Odysseus was condemned to another 10 years of wandering. At least, that’s how the editorial board that produced the Iliad and Odyssey seemed to see things. For the Greeks, 20 years of testing their manliness in war and Odysseus’ forced peregrination provided the matter that would define who they were as a civilization. A few centuries later, they offered the world the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the Aphrodite of Praxiteles, as well as the radically unarmed Venus de Milo.

      The key to the liberating Greek civilization from what Homer consistently described as a permanent manipulation of human heroes by capricious, undisciplined gods was the fact that a seemingly endless war did end. Once Odysseus, after a decade of wandering, had cleared his home of the crowd of suitors that had assembled coveting his neglected wife, the nation as a whole could settle down to producing a civilization in which art and intellect flourished (punctuated by an occasional war against Persians or even civil war between rival cities, just to keep everyone alert).

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      The Greeks understood that some seemingly endless things actually do need to end. The Washington Post — but more fundamentally, the deeply militarized economy of the US that The Post is wont to defend and promote — haven’t yet learned that lesson.

      With Global Warming Confirmed, Israeli Settlers Need Their Ice Cream More Than Ever

      Like Lebron James and the late Kobe Bryant, two basketball legends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are so famous that only their first names are needed to identify them. This is true, in any case, so long as the two names are paired together, since the first names Ben and Jerry lack the uniqueness of Lebron and Kobe. The two men from Merrick, New York, launched what became the most famous ice cream brand in the United States more than 30 years ago. They became celebrities thanks to the quality of their products but even more so to their marketing skills, which included a dose of sincere social concern and political awareness, something most successful businesses usually seek to avoid. Unlike the many brands that suddenly discovered their love for Black Lives Matter after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, their commitment to causes never reflected pure marketing opportunism.

      The two Jewish boys no longer run the business, but they have imprinted on it its dimension of social awareness. Consistently with the company’s moral conscience, the company Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop sales in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories. Consistently with a certain style of propaganda designed to legitimate policies and actions even more openly racist and oppressive than police brutality in the United States against blacks, the state of Israel itself and numerous organizations have accused Ben and Jerry’s of anti-Semitism.

      The Times of Israel reports on demonstrations in front of a Ben & Jerry’s in New York by militant Zionists who “led chants of ‘Shame on you, Ben & Jerry’s,’ ‘Everyone deserves ice cream’ and ‘From the river to the sea, Israel will always be.’”

      Deserve:

      Enjoy one of the rights essential to one’s well-being within a human community, a category that includes abstract notions such as the right to vote in a democracy and, more recently, following the logic of the consumer society, the right to purchase any commercial commodity

      The Context

      In the latest news, according to The Hill, Florida Senator Rick Scott is “calling for a federal investigation into Ben & Jerry’s over its decision to stop selling ice cream in occupied Palestinian territory.” This moment may appear as the most telling sign of the irreversible decline of a great democracy that once at least pretended to set standards for the rest of the world.

      In its famous 2010 Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court pushed the idea of freedom of speech to the point of authorizing corporations to undermine democratic processes by calling their use of money to influence elections “free speech.” Now, the idea that American citizens and corporations might use the feeble force of their refusal to consume products originating in a foreign country deemed virulently anti-democratic for its treatment of the populations living within its borders has already been condemned as unpatriotic and anti-Semitic. Florida and many other states have passed anti-BDS laws punishing efforts to boycott Israel, a country that practices policies similar to South Africa’s notorious apartheid system.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Ben & Jerry’s isn’t even proposing a boycott, which is the refusal to buy goods from a particular source. Ben & Jerry’s sell; they don’t buy. They aren’t even aiming at Israel as a nation, but will only refuse to sell in those parts that have been identified by the United Nations as illegally colonized. Scott, a Republican senator, wants the company investigated, condemned and presumably sanctioned for failing to blindly endorse an apartheid-style occupation conducted by a foreign country. He appears to think that the US Constitution’s First Amendment protects the right of Americans to speak out against the policies of one’s own country but not those of Israel.

      The key word is of course anti-Semitism, now considered to be identical with any form of criticism of Israel and a shortcut for letting original forms of white supremacy off the hook. The word has become a magic wand of the right in many Western countries. A conservative or even a liberal establishment politician can wave it in the air with appropriate gestures to shame anyone who dares to spout progressive themes about oppressed peoples and expect the media to respond.

      It’s curious that so few people who follow the media will stop to think about how paradoxical it may appear that a company founded by two Jewish guys, who remain the source of the firm’s social conscience, are labeled anti-Semitic by a US senator defending the right of another nation to practice an aggressive form of apartheid, one of the most extreme historical examples of white supremacy.

      *[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

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      What About Those Who Were Right on Afghanistan?

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      America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating US military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place. That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent US policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years — in Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars.

      While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon. Undersecretary Stephen Cambone’s notes from that meeting spell out how quickly and blindly US officials prepared to plunge our nation into the graveyards of empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. Cambone wrote that Rumsfeld wanted “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden] … Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

      What the World Can Learn From the Events in Afghanistan

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      So, within hours of these horrific crimes in the United States, the central question senior US officials were asking was not how to investigate them and hold the perpetrators accountable, but how to use this “Pearl Harbor” moment to justify wars, regime changes and militarism on a global scale.

      Three days later, Congress passed a bill authorizing the US president, George W. Bush, to use military force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” 

      In 2016, the Congressional Research Service reported that this Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) had been cited to justify 37 distinct military operations in 14 different countries and at sea. The vast majority of the people killed, maimed or displaced in these operations had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11. Successive US administrations have repeatedly ignored the actual wording of the authorization, which only authorized the use of force against those involved in some way in the 9/11 attacks. 

      Speaking Out

      The only member of Congress who had the wisdom and courage to vote against the 2001 AUMF was Barbara Lee of Oakland. She compared it to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and warned her colleagues that it would inevitably be used in the same expansive and illegitimate way. The final words of her floor speech echo presciently through the 20-year-long spiral of violence, chaos and war crimes it unleashed: “As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.” 

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      In a meeting at Camp David that weekend, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz argued forcefully for an attack on Iraq, even before Afghanistan. Bush insisted Afghanistan must come first, but he privately promised the Defense Policy Board chairman, Richard Perle, that Iraq would be their next target.

      In the days after September 11, the US corporate media followed the Bush administration’s lead, and the public heard only rare, isolated voices questioning whether war was the correct response to the crimes committed. But former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Ben Ferencz spoke to NPR a week after 9/11, and he explained that attacking Afghanistan was not only unwise and dangerous, but it was not a legitimate response to these crimes. NPR’s Katy Clark struggled to understand what he was saying:

      “Clark: …do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 [sic] people?

      Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

      Clark: No one is saying we’re going to punish those who are not responsible.

      Ferencz: We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t believe in what has happened, who don’t approve of what has happened.

      Clark: So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

      Ferencz: I wouldn’t say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn’t let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.”

      The drumbeat of war pervaded the airwaves, twisting 9/11 into a powerful propaganda narrative to whip up the fear of terrorism and justify the march to war. But many Americans shared the reservations of Lee and Ferencz, understanding enough of their country’s history to recognize that the 9/11 tragedy was being hijacked by the same military-industrial complex that produced the debacle in Vietnam and keeps reinventing itself generation after generation to support and profit from American wars, coups and militarism. 

      Making a Statement

      On September 28, 2001, the Socialist Worker website published statements by 15 writers and activists under the heading, “Why We Say No to War and Hate.” They included Noam Chomsky, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and one of these authors (Medea Benjamin). The statements took aim at the Bush administration’s attacks on civil liberties at home and abroad, as well as its plans for war on Afghanistan. 

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      The late academic and author Chalmers Johnson wrote that 9/11 was not an attack on the United States, but “an attack on U.S. foreign policy.” Edward Herman predicted “massive civilian casualties.” Matt Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, wrote that “For every innocent person Bush kills in this war, five or ten terrorists will arise.” Benjamin wrote that “a military response will only create more of the hatred against the U.S. that created this terrorism in the first place.” The analysis was correct and the predictions were prescient. The media and US politicians should start listening to the voices of peace and sanity instead of lying, delusional warmongers.

      What leads to catastrophes like the US war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing anti-war voices, but that the political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Lee, Ferencz and the 15 writers and activists. 

      That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control US politics on a bipartisan basis.  

      In every foreign policy crisis, the very existence of our military’s enormous destructive capacity and the myths our leaders promote to justify it converge in an orgy of self-serving interests and political pressures to stoke our fears and pretend that there are military “solutions” for them. 

      Another War

      Losing the Vietnam War was a serious reality check on the limits of US military power. As the junior officers who fought in Vietnam rose through the ranks to become America’s military leaders, they acted more cautiously and realistically for the next 20 years. But the end of the Cold War opened the door to an ambitious new generation of warmongers who were determined to capitalize on the US post-Cold War “power dividend.” 

      Madeleine Albright spoke for this emerging new breed of war-hawks when she confronted General Colin Powell in 1992 with her question, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” As secretary of state during Bill Clinton’s second term, Albright engineered the first of a series of illegal US invasions to carve out an independent Kosovo from the splintered remains of Yugoslavia. When UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told her his government was “having trouble with our lawyers” over the illegality of the NATO war plan, Albright said they should just “get new lawyers.”

      In the 1990s, the neocons and liberal interventionists dismissed and marginalized the idea that non-military, non-coercive approaches can more effectively resolve foreign policy problems without the horrors of war or deadly sanctions. This bipartisan war lobby then exploited the 9/11 attacks to consolidate and expand their control of US foreign policy.

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      But after spending trillions of dollars and killing countless numbers of people, the abysmal record of US war-making since World War II remains a tragic litany of failure and defeat, even on its own terms. The only wars the United States has won since 1945 have been limited conflicts to recover small neo-colonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait. Every time the United States has expanded its military ambitions to attack or invade larger or more independent countries, the results have been universally catastrophic.

      So, our country’s absurd investment of 66% of discretionary federal spending in destructive weapons, and recruiting and training young Americans to use them, does not make us safer but only encourages our leaders to unleash pointless violence and chaos on our neighbors around the world.

      Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional US political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy. Few people in other countries want any part of America’s wars, or its revived Cold War against China and Russia, and these trends are most pronounced among long-time US allies in Europe and its traditional “backyard” in Canada and Latin America.

      Change the Way We Live

      On October 19, 2001, Rumsfeld addressed B-2 bomber crews at Whiteman AFB in Missouri as they prepared to take off across the world to inflict misdirected vengeance on the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. He told them, “We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter. And you are the ones who will help achieve that goal.”

      Now that dropping tens of thousands of bombs and missiles on the people of Afghanistan for 20 years has failed to change the way they live, apart from killing hundreds of thousands of them and destroying their homes, we must instead, as Rumsfeld said, change the way we live. 

      We should start by finally listening to Barbara Lee. First, we should pass her bill to repeal the two post-9/11 AUMFs that launched our 20-year fiasco in Afghanistan and other wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Then, we should pass her bill to redirect $350 billion per year from the US military budget (roughly a 50% cut) to “increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.” 

      Finally reining in America’s out-of-control militarism would be a wise and appropriate response to its epic defeat in Afghanistan, before the same corrupt interests drag us into even more dangerous wars against more formidable enemies than the Taliban.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What the World Can Learn From the Events in Afghanistan

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      The collapse of the Western-backed government in Afghanistan has come as a shock. It has shaken confidence in democratic countries and changed the balance of power somewhat between the United States and China.

      It shows that efforts from the outside to topple regimes and replace them with friendlier ones are more difficult than anyone thought 20 years ago, when NATO forces first overthrew the Taliban regime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The aim of capturing Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, which was being harbored by the Taliban, was not achieved until much later in 2011. Even his attempted arrest and subsequent death took place in Pakistan — an ostensible ally of the United States — not Afghanistan. 

      The Hazaras of Afghanistan Face a Threat to Survival

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      The end of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan has lessons for those who might wish to undertake similar exercises in Somalia, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Mali or Venezuela. The objectives need to be clear and limited. Local support must be genuine. If one is seeking out terrorist organizations or individuals, an invasion is not the best way of achieving extradition. Nation-building is best done by locals.

      Existing regimes may be oppressive or corrupt, but if they are homegrown and have been developed organically from local roots, they survive better than anything — however enlightened — introduced from outside. Foreign boots on the ground and targeted bombings have limited effectiveness against networks of fanatics or mobile guerrillas. Western countries will now need to reassess their military spending priorities in light of the lessons from military interventions in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.

      With Afghanistan, it is the US and NATO that have the hardest lessons to learn. But if China were to attempt a similar exercise in nation-building from the outside — say, in Taiwan — it would have the same experience. The fact that Beijing has had to adopt such extreme measures in Xinjiang to integrate that province into the Chinese social system is a sign of weakness rather than strength. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Afghanistan is an ethnically diverse country that, despite its diversity and disunity, has been able to resist rule from Britain, the Soviet Union and now the US and NATO. Religion was a unifying factor in an otherwise divided country. It seems the Taliban have been more effective in building an ethnically diverse coalition than the previous Afghan government. But it is not yet clear whether the Taliban will be able to hold that coalition together.

      It does seem that the Taliban have, in the past, been able to impose a degree of order in Afghan society and been able to punish corruption. Between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban created a form of order in a brutal and misogynistic way. Order is something the outgoing government in Kabul could not provide, even with generous outside help. After all, order is a prerequisite for any form of stable existence. Without order, there can be no rule of law and no democracy. Coupled with that, civil society breaks down. This applies in the West as much as it does in Central Asia and South Asia.

      Order is created by a combination of three essentials: loyalty, acquiescence and fear. All three elements are needed to some extent. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president between 2001 and 2014, could not command these three elements. It remains to be seen whether the Taliban will do any better.

      Will There Be a Change in US Strategy? 

      It is hard to assess the effect the Afghan debacle will have on the United States, which has by far the most elaborate and expensive military forces in the world. There is a strong temptation to turn inward and reduce commitments to the defense of other countries, including European ones. From 1783 until 1941, the US tended to remain neutral and rely on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for protection against its enemies.  

      The countries of the European Union will also need to work out what their practical defense priorities are in light of the events in Afghanistan and other recent experiences. This is a political task of great difficulty because the 27 member states have very different views and geographic imperatives.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What Starts in Afghanistan Does Not Stay in Afghanistan

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      The Taliban’s offensive in Afghanistan has shifted the Central Asian playing field on which China, India and the United States compete with rival infrastructure-driven approaches. At first glance, a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan would give China a 2:0 advantage against the US and India, but that could prove to be a shaky head start.

      The fall of the US-backed Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani will shelve if not kill Indian support for the Iranian port of Chabahar, which was intended to facilitate Indian trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia. Chabahar was also viewed by India as a counterweight to the Chinese-supported Pakistani port of Gwadar, a crown jewel of Beijing’s transportation, telecommunications and energy-driven Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

      The Hazaras of Afghanistan Face a Threat to Survival

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      The United States facilitated Indian investment in Chabahar by exempting the port from harsh sanctions against Iran. The exemption was intended to “support the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan.” However, due to stalled negotiations with Iran about a revival of the 2015 nuclear agreement, the US announced in July — together with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan — plans to create a platform that would foster regional trade, business ties and connectivity.

      The connectivity end of the plan resembled an effort to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It would have circumvented Iran and weakened Chabahar but potentially strengthened China’s Gwadar alongside the port of Karachi. That has become a moot point with the plans certain to be shelved as the Taliban take over Afghanistan and form a government that would be denied recognition by at least the democratic parts of the international community.

      China

      Like other Afghan neighbors, neither Pakistan, Uzbekistan nor China are likely to join a boycott of the Taliban. On the contrary, China last month made a point of giving a visiting Taliban delegation a warm welcome. Yet recognition by Iran, Central Asian states and China of a Taliban government is unlikely to be enough to salvage the Chabahar project. “Changed circumstances and alternative connectivity routes are being conjured up by other countries to make Chabahar irrelevant,” an Iranian source told Hard News, a Delhi-based publication.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Taliban have sought to reassure China, Iran, Uzbekistan and other Afghan neighbors that they will not allow Afghanistan to become an operational base for jihadist groups. This includes al-Qaeda and Uighur militants of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP). The Taliban have positioned themselves as solely concerned with creating an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan and having no inclination to operate beyond the country’s borders. But they have been consistent in their refusal to expel al-Qaeda, even if the group is a shadow of what it was when it launched the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

      The TIP has occasionally issued videos documenting its presence in Afghanistan. But it has, by and large, kept a low profile and refrained from attacking Chinese targets in Afghanistan or across the border in Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese province in which authorities have brutally cracked down on ethnic Turkic Uighurs. As a result, the Taliban reassurance was insufficient to stop China from repeatedly advising its citizens to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible. “Currently, the security situation in Afghanistan has further deteriorated … If Chinese citizens insist on staying in Afghanistan, they will face extremely high-security risks, and all the consequences will be borne by themselves,” the Chinese foreign ministry said.

      Pakistan

      The fallout of the Taliban’s sweep across Afghanistan is likely to affect China beyond Afghan borders, perhaps no more so than in Pakistan, a major focus of Beijing’s single largest BRI-related investment. This has made China a target for attacks by militants, primarily Baloch nationalists. In July, nine Chinese nationals were killed in an explosion on a bus transporting Chinese workers to the construction site of a dam in the northern mountains of Pakistan, a region prone to attacks by religious militants. This incident raises the specter of jihadists also targeting China. It was the highest loss of life of Chinese citizens in recent years in Pakistan.

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      The attack occurred amid fears that the Taliban will bolster ultra-conservative religious sentiment in Pakistan that celebrates the group as heroes, whose success enhances the chances for austere religious rule. “Our jihadis will be emboldened. They will say that ‘if America can be beaten, what is the Pakistan army to stand in our way?’” said a senior Pakistani official. Indicating its concern, China has delayed the signing of a framework agreement on industrial cooperation, which would have accelerated the implementation of projects that are part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

      Kamran Bokhari, writing for The Wall Street Journal, explained: “Regime change is a terribly messy process. Weak regimes can be toppled; replacing them is the hard part. It is only a matter of time before the Afghan state collapses, unleashing chaos that will spill beyond its borders. All of Afghanistan’s neighbors will be affected to varying degrees, but Pakistan and China have the most to lose.”

      The demise of Chabahar and/or the targeting by the Taliban of Hazara Shia Muslims in Afghanistan could potentially turn Iran into a significant loser too.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More