Text/Tariq ali translation/Du Yunfei
Tariq ali is a prominent British historian, political activist, public intellectual, and a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review. This article was originally published on the New Left Review's blog sidecar.
On 13 August 2021, members of the Joint Forces Headquarters are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan to assist in the withdrawal of troops from the area. As the security situation in Afghanistan rapidly deteriorates, the United States plans to send 3,000 troops to help evacuate some of the U.S. Embassy's personnel in Kabul.
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban reoccupied Kabul, a major political and ideological defeat for the American Empire. Helicopters carrying U.S. Embassy staff to Kabul airport are reminiscent of April 1975 in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. The speed with which Taliban militants have swept the country is staggering, and their strategic acumen is extraordinary, and the Taliban conquered Kabul in a single week of victory. The 300,000-strong Afghan army was crushed and many refused to fight. In fact, thousands of them defected to the Taliban and immediately demanded the unconditional surrender of the puppet government. President Ashraf Ghani, the darling of the American media, fled Afghanistan to seek asylum in Oman. The Taliban's emirate flag now flies over his presidential palace. In some respects, the most apt metaphor is not Saigon, but the Sultan of the 19th century, when Mahdi forces swept through the Sultan's capital, Khartoum, killing General Gordon. William Morris celebrated Mahdi's victory as a defeat for the British Empire. However, although Sudanese rebels killed the entire garrison, there was not much bloodshed in Kabul. The Taliban didn't even try to take over the U.S. embassy, let alone attack U.S. personnel.
Mahdi forces swept through Khartoum, the sudanese capital, killing General Gordon.
The end of the twentieth anniversary of the war on terror is predictable and heralds the defeat of the United States, NATO and other allies. However, no matter what one thinks of the Taliban's policies — and I've been a harsh critic for years — their achievements are undeniable. During the period when the United States was destroying one Arab country after another, there was never any resistance to challenge the occupiers. This defeat by the United States is likely to be a turning point. That's why politicians in Europe are complaining. They have also suffered humiliation for unconditionally supporting U.S. operations in Afghanistan — especially britain.
Biden had no choice. The United States announced that it would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in September 2021, but did not achieve any of its "liberating" goals: freedom and democracy, equal rights for women, and the destruction of the Taliban. While the United States may be militarily invincible, the tears of painful liberals confirm the deeper depths of America's failure. Most of them — Frederick Kagan of The New York Times and Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times — believe the withdrawal should be delayed in order to contain the Taliban. But Biden, backed by the Pentagon, simply approved the Trump-launched peace process, which reached an agreement in February 2020 with the participation of the United States, the Taliban, India, China and Pakistan. The U.S. security apparatus knew the invasion had failed: no matter how long U.S. troops stayed, the Taliban could not be subdued. The claim that Biden's hasty withdrawal has somehow made the militants stronger is unfounded.
The truth is that for more than two decades, the United States has failed to build anything that fulfills its mission. The illuminated "green zone" (an area in Kabul made up of embassies, NGOs, and various foreign affairs activities, surrounded by concrete explosion walls and checkpoints) was always surrounded by darkness incomprehensible to the operatives. In one of the world's poorest countries, billions of dollars are used each year to install air conditioning in barracks where American soldiers and officers are stationed, while food and clothing are regularly flown in from bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. As poor people gather near bins to pick up supplies, it is not surprising that a huge slum has emerged on the edge of Kabul. The low wages paid to the Afghan security services cannot persuade them to fight their fellow citizens. Supporters of the Taliban infiltrated the more than 20-year-old army early on, trained for free to use modern military equipment and acting as spies for Afghan resistance.
This is the tragic reality of "humanitarian intervention". Although there is something commendable: the country's exports have increased significantly. During the Taliban rule (1996-2001), opium production was strictly monitored. Opium production has increased dramatically since the U.S. invasion, now accounting for 90 percent of the global heroin market – in part to question whether this protracted conflict should be seen as a new "opium war". Afghan ministries that serviced the U.S. occupation shared trillions of dollars in profits. Western officers were handsomely paid, allowing this trade to take place. One in ten young Afghans is now an opium addict. Figures for NATO troops have not yet been released.
As for the status of women, there has been little major change. Outside of the "green zone" of various NGOs, there has been little social progress. A major Afghan feminist in exile pointed out that Afghan women have three enemies: The Western Occupation, the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban force of warlords. She said that after the U.S. withdrawal, they will have only two enemies (at the time of writing, perhaps amended to one enemy, because the Taliban offensive in the north has repelled the main factions of the Northern Alliance). Despite repeated requests from journalists and activists, no reliable data has been released on the sex work industry that has developed in the service of the occupying forces. There are also no reliable rape statistics – despite the fact that U.S. soldiers routinely use sexual violence against "terrorist suspects", rape Afghan civilians, and allied militias have carried out blatant abuse of children. Prostitution multiplied during the Yugoslav civil war and the region became a centre for sex trafficking. The involvement of the United Nations in this lucrative operation is well documented. In Afghanistan, full details have not been made public.
Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have fought in Afghanistan. Of those, 2,448 died, and nearly 4,000 U.S. contractors died. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, about 20,589 people were wounded in the fighting. The number of casualties in Afghanistan is difficult to estimate, as no one calculates the "enemy death toll", including civilians. Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives project estimated that by mid-January 2002, at least 4,200 to 4,500 civilians had been killed by U.S. attacks, including both direct casualties from aerial bombing operations and indirect casualties from the ensuing humanitarian crisis. As of 2021, the Associated Press reported that 47,245 civilians had been killed as a result of the U.S. occupation. Afghan civil rights activists gave a higher total, insisting that 100,000 Afghans, many of them non-combatants, had died, with three times as many injured as the death toll.
In 2019, The Washington Post published an internal 2,000-page report commissioned by the U.S. federal government, the Afghanistan Papers, dissecting the defeats of the longest war. The report is based on a series of interviews with U.S. generals (retired and active), political advisers, diplomats, aid workers and more. Their comprehensive assessment is shocking. General Douglas Lute, the "war tsar of Afghanistan" during the Bush and Obama administrations, admitted, "We lack a basic understanding of Afghanistan — we don't know what we're doing ... We know nothing about the task we are doing... If the American people know the severity of this dysfunction..." Another first-hand experiencer, Jeffrey Eggers, a former Navy SEALs and White House worker in the Bush and Obama administrations, highlighted the huge waste of resources: "What have we got out of this $1 trillion effort?" Is it worth $1 trillion? ...... After killing Osama bin Laden, I said that given how much money we spent in Afghanistan, Osama might be laughing in his waterhole. Eggers had every reason to say, "We [the United States] still lose." ”
On November 15, 2001, U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers entered Afghanistan in a Chinook helicopter.
Who is the enemy? The Taliban, Pakistan, all Afghans? A long-serving U.S. soldier is convinced that at least one-third of Afghan police officers are addicted to drugs, and a significant number are Taliban supporters. This posed a big problem for U.S. soldiers, with an unnamed special forces leader testifying in 2017: "Soldiers thought I was going to come to them with a map and tell them where the good guys and bad guys lived... It took them several conversations to understand that I didn't have the information in my hand. At first, they just kept asking who the bad guys were and where they were. ”
Donald Rumsfeld (a two-time U.S. secretary of defense and is considered one of the prominent hawks in George W. Bush's cabinet) expressed the same view as early as 2003. He wrote, "I don't know who the bad guys in Afghanistan and Iraq are. I read all the intelligence in the community and it sounds like we know a lot of things, but in fact, when you try to do it, you find that we don't get any information that we can resort to action. Sadly, we have flaws in intelligence. "The inability to distinguish between friend and foe is a serious problem – not just at the level of Schmidt's political concept, but at the practical level. In a crowded market, if you can't distinguish between allies and enemies after an improvised explosive device attack, your response is to lash out at everyone and create more enemies in the process.
Colonel Christopher Kolenda, an adviser to three current generals, pointed to another problem in the U.S. military's mission. Corruption, he said, was rampant from the start; Karzai's government was "self-organised into a kleptocracy." This undermines the post-2002 strategy of building a State capable of a smooth transition from occupation. "Tiny corruption is like skin cancer, there are many ways to deal with it, and you might be fine. Corruption within the department, at a higher level, is like worse colon cancer, but if you find out in time, you might also be fine. However, thief rule, like brain cancer, is deadly. "Of course, the Pakistani government, which has ruled by thieves at all levels, has been around for decades. But in Afghanistan, where nation-building is led by an occupation army and the central government lacks popular support.
What about the false reports about the Taliban's inability to make a comeback after being defeated? A senior official at the National Security Council reflected on the lies broadcast by his colleagues: "It's their explanatory strategy. For example, are attacks by the (Taliban) worsening the situation? This is because they have more targets to attack, so judging instability with more attacks is a false indicator. 'Three months later, the attack is still worsening? 'This is because the Taliban are becoming more and more desperate, so this is actually a signal that we are winning'... This has been going on for two reasons, one is to make all those involved look good, and the other is to make people think that the army and resources are working in some way, and the withdrawal of troops and resources will lead to a worsening of the situation in Afghanistan. ”
All of this is an open secret in the archives of NATO countries and in the Ministry of Defense. In October 2014, The Uk's Defence Secretary Michael Fallon admitted that "[we] made mistakes militarily, and the mistakes were made by the politicians of the time, which go back 10 or 13 years ... In any case, we will not send combat troops back to Afghanistan. Four years later, British Prime Minister Theresa May redeployed British troops to Afghanistan and doubled the number of soldiers "to help deal with the fragile security situation". Now, the British media is echoing the Foreign Office for criticizing Biden for making the wrong move at the wrong time. Sir Nick Carter, head of the British Armed Forces, said a new invasion might be necessary. Conservative backbenchers, colonial nostalgia, puppet journalists and Blair's demanded that Britain remain in the war-torn country forever.
Surprisingly, neither General Carter nor his successors seem to acknowledge the massive crisis facing the American war machine, as described in the Afghanistan Papers. While American military planners slowly realized the reality, their British counterparts remained obsessed with fantasies about Afghanistan. Some argue that as al-Qaida regroups under the leadership of a new Islamic emirate, the withdrawal will put Europe's security at risk. But these predictions are not sincere. The United States and Britain have spent years arming and aiding al-Qaida in Syria, as they have done in Bosnia and Libya. This act of spreading fear can only play a role in the swamp of ignorance. At least for the British public, it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. History sometimes emphasizes pressing truths to nations by vividly displaying facts or exposing the face of the elite. The current withdrawal may be one such moment. The British, already hostile to the war on terror, are likely to be more determined against future military conquest.
What does the future hold? Following the model developed for Iraq and Syria, the United States announced the creation of a permanent special military unit with 2,500 troops stationed at a base in Kuwait, ready to fly to Afghanistan and bomb and kill if necessary. Meanwhile, in July, a Taliban delegation visited China, promising that Afghanistan would never again be used as a launch pad against other countries. They had friendly discussions with the Chinese foreign minister. Now, with NATO's retreat, the key players are China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan. No country wants a new civil war, in stark contrast to what happened to the United States and its allies after the Soviet Union withdrew. China's close ties with Tehran and Moscow could allow China to secure some fragile peace for the citizens of the traumatized country with continued help from Russia in the north.
Emphasis is placed on the average age of Afghanistan: 18 years old, with a population of 40 million. On its own, this makes no sense. But there is hope that young Afghans will fight for a better life after a four-decade-long conflict. For Afghan women, even if there is only one enemy left, the struggle will never end. In Britain and elsewhere, all those who want to continue fighting must turn their attention to the refugees who are about to knock on NATO's doors. At the very least, the refuge is what the West owes them, a trivial compensation for an unnecessary war.
Editor-in-Charge: Wu Qin