Never forget how the US failed Afghanistan
Safa Ahmed
Joe Biden’s address to the nation on the topic of Afghanistan’s collapse was a measured PR move. In his speech on August 16, as images of a collapsing state flooded the news, the President lamented the loss of 2,443 American soldiers and repeatedly applauded their efforts.
“Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland,” Biden said. “And that’s why, as President, I am adamant that we focus on the threats we face today in 2021 — not yesterday’s threats.”
“Yesterday’s threats” is a dismissive way to describe the 20-year American failure that was the Afghanistan War. Meanwhile, the photographs emerging from Afghanistan depict chaos: airports packed with people fleeing the nation; people plunging to their deaths after fighting tooth and nail to get on departure flights; a man rolling whitewash over floor-to-ceiling photographs of women; the Afghan flag lying crumpled in the stone courtyard of the Presidential Palace.
“Yesterday’s threats” is a 180-degree turnaround from the hand-wringing over Afghan women’s rights and alarming child mortality rates. Biden might have meant to sound collected and in control, but there is no getting around the fact that America has all but bent a knee to the Taliban.
In the same week, countless Afghan influencers took to social media to reiterate what they have been saying for years: the Taliban is brutal and bad for Afghans, but the US was never the benevolent saviour it claimed to be.
Zirrar, an Iranian writer and photographer, used Instagram to post a collage of war photography: machine guns, drones, tanks, blindfolded brown prisoners kneeling in orange jumpsuits before white American soldiers. In his caption, he writes, “On whom does the blame fall? [On] the hundreds of thousands killed? On the generations permanently traumatised, on those injured and forever left impacted, on those orphaned and widowed?”
“Today you flood my DMs and say you care. Is this what it took?” writes Madina Wardak, an LA-based social worker of Afghan origin. “241,000 deaths? That’s the official number, but it’s hard to count bodies when they’re piles of flesh. Drug addiction up 300%? Babies born with deformities because of radiation from your bombs? Our diaspora communities ravaged with trauma? My mother & father are living ghosts you’ve created, they don’t haunt you but I bear witness to their pain everyday.”
Biden didn’t address these concerns in his speech. He also didn’t acknowledge the fact that while US troops enlist willingly to go to war, their presence was never something Afghans had asked for.
“How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not?” Biden asked.
“You have been told it is a civil war - we Afghans have killed each other, but mainly on the bankroll of foreign governments who divide to conquer,” Wardak retorts on Instagram.
Zirrar continues, “What about those massacred in cold blood, raped and pillaged? On those bombed from the air in 'precision' drone strikes that have wiped entire families? [....] Should the Afghans be blamed or the foreign powers that used Afghanistan as [their] playground for military spending and nation-building fantasies?”
The reason behind her blindfold is the fact that Shabat Gul was forced to pose and had no choice but to let the photographer take the picture. Art: © Minna Mamik (@minnamamik)
Their message is clear: America’s presence in Afghanistan was a colonial project from the beginning, and a failed one at that. In American media’s coverage of events, however, Afghan voices seem to be drowned out, while veterans and foreign policy experts are spotlighted. The narrative is still one-sided and whitewashed: Afghanistan remains a vague concept in American minds, a land of terrorism and barren hills and blue burqa-wearing silhouettes. Veterans good, Taliban bad.
This narrative, however, isn’t as tightly controlled as the White House might like it to be. Over the past 20 years, America has failed Afghanistan time and time again, in ways that human rights organisations and even the International Criminal Court have taken note of.
Perhaps the greatest failure began with the reason for invading Afghanistan to begin with. When presented to the American public, those reasons tend to come in a varied, jumbled mix. Did we invade Afghanistan because of 9/11 (even though it was al-Qaeda that took responsibility for the attack)? Did we invade because the Taliban are terrorists? Did we invade because oppressed Afghan women need to be freed? Did we invade because the United States fights for liberty and justice for all?
In actuality, American interests in the region go all the way back to the Cold War. In the late 1970s, Afghanistan became the battlefield of a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The USSR wanted to prop up a communist government, which was met with fierce opposition from the Mujahideen, a group of Afghan guerrilla fighters who would one day evolve into the Taliban. The United States, not wanting Soviet Russia to maintain influence in the country, gave its full support to the Mujahideen, arming and funding its fighters.
This decade-long war killed up to 2 million Afghans and forced 7 million more from their homes. Only twelve years later, in 2001, the U.S. would storm Afghanistan again, inflicting the trauma of war on yet another generation of Afghans. This time, their target would be the Taliban - the very group they had helped bring to power.
“The Afghanistan you see today has its roots in the British occupation of India, exacerbated by the USSR & USA,” writes Wardak. “Regional powers like Pakistan, Iran, China and Gulf Arab states have all co-conspired with imperialists to reach their hands under my land for its resources - 3 trillion [dollars’] worth.”
Those natural resources include massive veins of iron, cobalt, copper, gold, as well as vast deposits of lithium. Lithium is a key mineral used to make rechargeable batteries for cell phones, laptops, cameras, and electric vehicles. In 2010, when these deposits were discovered, the New York Times reported that US officials believed “Afghanistan could eventually transform into one of the most important mining centers in the world.”
Land and precious metals - the building blocks of empires. For the United States to have control over the Afghan government was to have priority access to these resources, beating out Russia, China, and other regional powers.
On top of that, there was money to be made from the war itself. The Intercept reports that $10,000 of stocks purchased from America’s top five defence contractors would now be worth $97,295. In other words, thanks to the Afghanistan War, defense stocks outperformed the rest of the stock market by 58 percent. That money now cushions the pockets of private American citizens and corporations, while 47.3% of Afghans lived below the poverty line in 2020.
It’s also no coincidence that the three corporations who profited the most from the war - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon - have all had senior company officials placed in White House positions.
“Your pharmaceutical companies bet on us too; 80% of the world’s opium is Afghan-grown,” writes Wardak. “Ironic you believe we are the ones dependent on you.”
Biden also ignores just how many human rights violations Afghan civilians have suffered at the hands of the US military - including the deaths of men, women, children, students, and hospitalised individuals.
In 2008, 37 civilians were killed by an airstrike while attending a wedding party in the village of Wech Baghtu. In the same year, an airstrike on the village of Azizabad killed over 90 people, most of them children, and destroyed 8 homes.
In 2015, the US Air Force bombed the Kunduz Trauma Centre, killing at least 42 patients. Doctors Without Borders, the organisation running the hospital, called the airstrike “deliberate” and a “war crime.” In most of these cases, women and children made up the majority of the casualties.
And these are just the air strikes. The troops on the ground were equally responsible for inflicting terror on the Afghan people. In 2010, the Guardian reported that twelve American soldiers - including some Iraq War veterans - had killed Afghan civilians “for sport” and collected fingers as trophies. US soldiers have used "excessive force" during arrest operations, including blowing doors open with grenades, treating women roughly, and shooting students. Raids resulted in homes being looted, the valuables rarely returned.
One man recalls watching his young son and nephew, aged 11 and 13, thrown to the ground by soldiers and pinned down by boots pressed into their backs. Indefinite detentions and arbitrary arrests were common protocol. The military has propped up abusive warlords, some of whom routinely sexually abused young boys, and ordered US soldiers to look the other way.
Despite all this, the United States hasn’t decided to take a step back from its imperial project. If anything, American media takes it as a given that more nations will be invaded in the future - or, to phrase it the way NPR has, the US will work “to get better at rebuilding other countries.”
It is this mix of American imperialism, exceptionalism, and racism that keeps any of these lessons from truly sinking in. The public, echoing Joe Biden and the military officials who are interviewed on TV, largely seems to believe that America’s failure in Afghanistan is because of Afghans themselves. That much can be gathered by scrolling through the comments on YouTube videos featuring coverage of the Taliban’s takeover.
Excerpts of YouTube comments regarding Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Afghan and Middle Eastern activists continue to attempt to hammer the point in for those who will listen.
“People from my region do not live in a post-colonial world; we exist within the legacies that empires leave behind,” Wardak writes. “You play the towers falling on 9/11 every year. My people do not have the luxury. My people are constant gardeners, planting flowers on top of mass graves.”
“I remember the day America and Britain bombed Kabul. I remember being awed at the military audacity of the Americans. I remember the dropping of million dollar bombs on Afghan farmers. I remember being told this was all to save the women of Afghanistan,” Zirrar recalls. “Enough is enough… We aren't a playground for Western interventionism.”
“We have too many dates to grieve; your 9/11 is our 24/7,” Wardak concludes. “Look what you’ve done. I hope it haunts you.”
The art accompanying this article is courtesy of © Minna Mamik (@minnamamik).