Six on History: Afghanistan
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ABC's website had an AP report (2/13/22) on Biden's misappropriation of Afghan funds—but nothing on its TV news programs.
Two months ago (FAIR.org, 12/21/21), I noted the striking contrast between vocal media outrage—ostensibly grounded in concern for Afghan people—over President Joe Biden's withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and the relative silence over the growing humanitarian crisis in that country, which threatens millions with life-threatening levels of famine.
While influenced by drought and Taliban policies, the current crisis is primarily driven by the US decisions to freeze the assets of the country's central bank and maintain economic sanctions, which have destabilized the banking system and sent the economy into a tailspin.
Last Friday, Biden announced his intention to take the $7 billion in frozen funds currently held in US banks and use them as he sees fit, giving half to a humanitarian aid trust fund for Afghans and half to families of 9/11 victims.
Lest anyone imagine this to be generous in any way, note that the $7 billion—most of which originated as international aid, and representing the vast majority of the central bank's assets—belongs to the Afghan people, not to Biden. And the Afghan people bear zero responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. On the contrary, they are also its victims, because of the subsequent US decision to invade and occupy their country.
Beyond that, giving them back half of the money that is rightfully theirs in the form of "aid"—instead of returning it to the banking system—is not only a band-aid that doesn't solve the country's liquidity problem, it's nearly impossible to do anyway, given the sanctions still in place (Relief Web, 2/12/21).
Biden's announcement offered a perfect hook for reporting on the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, and anyone who truly cares about the Afghan people and their rights should be tearing their hair out and screaming at the top of their lungs about this audacious injustice that will surely result in more deaths and hardship. But despite their wailing about the Taliban's impact on Afghan women's futures, few in US TV news seem concerned about those same women facing starvation as a result of US policy.
Since Biden's announcement on February 11, there have been a total of 10 mentions on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC: six the day of the announcement, four the next day, and none by the third day. The broadcast network news shows, which have more viewers than cable news, aired exactly zero reports on the issue. CNN made eight mentions, MSNBC two and Fox one. Six of the ten were brief mentions that noted no criticism of the move.
Masuda Sultan to Chris Hayes (MSNBC, 2/11/22): "This was a devastating day for Afghans who were hoping to have a sign that their economy would have a chance of surviving."
Only two shows deemed the story big enough to bring on a guest to discuss it: Jake Tapper's CNN show (2/11/22) and Chris Hayes' MSNBC show (2/11/22). Hayes devoted the last several minutes of his show to an interview with guest Masuda Sultan of the group Unfreeze Afghanistan. Hayes noted that the US "could help [the Afghan] people by simply doing one thing, unfreezing of the billions of dollars of Afghan government assets that are sitting in New York banks," and Sultan argued that Biden's move would simply create "a bigger and bigger humanitarian disaster, by not allowing banking to function and not allowing the economy to be back on its feet":
What Afghans need more than anything, is food, indeed, they need aid, but they also need jobs, they need an economy, they need to be able to import food, they need to be able to pay their teachers, pay their healthcare workers. You know, all of these sort of normal functions that you expect to happen in a country are now crippled.
Tapper, in contrast, invited a family member of a 9/11 victim for her perspective on the decision. (Tapper did ask his guest to respond to "the people who say this is just penalizing this move today, the Afghan people who are suffering greatly, and they shouldn't be hurt because of what happened on 9/11.")
Austin Ahlman (Intercept, 2/11/22): "The decision puts Biden on track to cause more death and destruction in Afghanistan than was caused by the 20 years of war that he ended."
CNN's Newsroom (2/11/22) and New Day Saturday (2/12/22) were the only other two shows to even briefly mention any criticisms or questions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the decision.
On Newsroom, reporter Jeremy Diamond noted that "there are questions, though, about whether taking these funds away from the central bank could make it more difficult for Afghanistan to stabilize its currency."
A serious report would have explained that these aren't merely questions, they're certainties, and Biden knows it. As a senior Democratic foreign policy aide told the Intercept's Austin Ahlman (2/11/22), Biden
has had warnings from the UN secretary general, the International Rescue Committee and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.
On CNN, Diamond's colleague Jim Sciutto concluded: "Trying to strike some sort of middle line here between not helping the Taliban, but somehow getting help urgently to the Afghan people."
"When speaking about American foreign policy, U.S. officials across the political spectrum constantly invoke virtuous ideas such as human rights and international law. Today, for instance, as the State Department has focused its attention on the potential of a Russian invasion in Ukraine, the language employed is the all-familiar discourse of sovereignty and an international rules-based order.
Actual U.S. actions tell a different story. American troops violated Iraq’s sovereignty in a 2003 war of aggression, in blatant violation of international law—just one of numerous such instances of unprovoked invasion and occupation. From endless war in Syria and Somalia, to economic devastation in Iran, to aiding crimes against humanity, and arming war criminals and dictators, the reality of U.S. foreign policy belies the boastful rhetoric of the U.S. as a force for good in the world.
Though the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the U.S. and Afghanistan is America’s longest war, U.S. meddling in Afghanistan dates back several decades. U.S. intrusion into Afghan affairs even predates the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. As professor Stephen Zunes notes, the U.S. began arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan six months prior to the Soviet offensive with the knowledge that it would increase the chances of a Soviet invasion. National-security adviser to President Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed this would be a positive outcome by coaxing the Soviets “into the Afghan trap” and draining their resources.
As Middle East scholar Fawaz Gerges argues, while President Reagan in the 1980s used hostile language toward Islam and Muslims, he simultaneously supported militant Islamic elements as long as they resisted the Soviet Union. According to Fawaz, these short-sighted policies and “U.S.-backed Islamic guerillas in Afghanistan would come to haunt the United States,” alluding to the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001. In these calculations, essentially no attention was given to the costs on Afghans themselves or the reverberations of these policies throughout the region.
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration unleashed its “war on terror,” which largely went after states and impacted millions of people who were not responsible for the shocking attacks. Despite plunging Afghanistan into yet another decades-long war, U.S. officials continuously misled the public about its progress, ending in failure after 20 years with the Taliban’s swift reconquest of Afghanistan—leaving them in firmer control than they were in 2001.
As if fomenting the extremism and chaos that helped create the Taliban in the first place and a brutal 20-year occupation were not enough, the U.S. continues today to collectively punish the Afghan people with sanctions and by freezing access to most of the Central Bank of Afghanistan’s currency reserves. As the world’s largest economy and with the power of the dollar, the U.S. utilizes economic ruin as a tool of warfare. Despite the ineffectiveness of these policies—as seen in a six-decade embargo on Cuba or the failure of “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran—and the fact that innocent civilians bear the brunt of the destruction they cause, the U.S. continues to expand its use.
This is morally bankrupt. These are not the policies of a just society, though it is not surprising given the inequities and injustices inside our own borders. These are not policies that promote human rights and democracy, or support an international rules-based order. Quite the contrary, by abusing human rights and placing ourselves above the rules, the U.S. does spectacular damage to that very order.
The American narrative is that we are not only exceptional but that we are also exceptionally moral and a force for good in the world, while, in reality, we wreak havoc on it. In actual fact, the U.S. is currently playing a central role in the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen—complicit in the Saudi-led war and blockade—and the world’s worst oncoming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. Without recognizing these contradictions and working to end them, the new world order promised in the aftermath of catastrophic world wars can never be realized."
"Famine is tightening its grip on Afghanistan. As James Downie points out at The Washington Post, the country is facing the worst humanitarian disaster on the planet. United Nations agencies estimate that 95 percent of Afghans already don’t have enough food, and by this summer 97 percent will be in poverty. Refugees are pouring out of the country. Literally millions could die, especially young children.
The Biden administration triggered this famine by stealing from the Afghan people, while maintaining broad economic sanctions against the country. When the American occupation ended, the American state seized approximately $7 billion in currency reserves from the Afghan central bank (which were not America-provided funds, but accumulated through trade). This has caused all the problems one might expect. The banking system has ceased to function; businesses can’t find credit and have resorted to mass bankruptcies and layoffs; people can’t get enough cash; the country can’t afford necessary imports; and the value of the currency is collapsing.
After dithering for several months, the administration recently announced that it is taking $3.5 billion of the reserves and setting it aside for families of 9/11 victims, while sending another $3.5 billion to unspecified humanitarian relief efforts.
This makes it virtually impossible for the dire economic and humanitarian situation in Afghanistan to recover. But it’s actually worse than that: The main recipients of the looted reserves are likely to include a former administration insider and numerous well-connected lawyers and lobbyists.
Lee Fang and Ryan Grim report at The Intercept that Lee Wolosky of the law firm Jenner & Block LLP worked in the Biden White House on Afghanistan issues from September to January. He is now a lead attorney for a handful of 9/11 families attempting to get their mitts on the Afghan reserves. (The firm insists that Wolosky recused himself from any issues related to his legal work while in the administration.) Fang reports in another article that the firms Kreindler & Kreindler and Motley Rice are also scrambling for their place at the imperial feeding trough, with the help of several lobbyists with close connections to the Biden administration.
The collective payout to all the swarming lawyers and lobbyists could easily be over $500 million—quite literally in the form of bread snatched from the mouths of starving widows and orphans. By the same token, given past experience in Afghanistan, a big chunk of the $3.5 billion in humanitarian donations will undoubtedly vanish into the pockets of Western contractors and nonprofits, rather than reaching the people who need it.
As Trevor Filseth explains at The National Interest, the primary cause of this famine is not agricultural, but economic. There is likely enough food in Afghanistan for all Afghans to survive, and in any case more could be imported as needed. The main problem is the shattering recession and currency crisis that has crushed the Afghan economy since American troops withdrew. Occupation spending accounted for about 40 percent of the country’s GDP, and three-quarters of its government budget. Most Afghans can’t afford food that would otherwise be readily available.
Virtually all famines in the modern era have been like this. As economist and philosopher Amartya Sen famously argued in his book Poverty and Famines, since at least the Industrial Revolution, famines have virtually never been caused by an absolute shortage of food, but instead by the price of food rising beyond the reach of the poor. During the Bengal famine of 1943, for instance, the local food supply was actually increasing, but economic shifts drove large segments of society out of work, and British colonial administrators refused to organize sufficient relief efforts. As a result, some two to three million died from starvation and disease.
It follows that humanitarian relief efforts, while important, are not the most effective step that could be taken to ameliorate the crisis in Afghanistan. The key thing is to unclog the financial system and breathe some life back into the economy. And the most effective way to do that would be to restore Afghanistan’s currency reserves. Instead, hundreds of millions of dollars are earmarked for attorney’s fees.
A likely objection to restoring the central bank reserves is that it would benefit the Taliban, who are liable to oppress the Afghan people and engage in corruption. On one level this is gobsmacking hypocrisy. America has no leg to stand on in terms of oppression, given the murderous warlord proxies we relied on during the occupation, and the multiple horrifying atrocities committed by U.S. troops. Similarly, the U.S. puppet state that preceded Taliban rule was one of the most corrupt governments in human history, and a large chunk of that corruption was carried out by American contractors and mercenaries, who funneled occupation money into their own pockets by the tens of billions.
This makes the self-serving arguments from thieving lawyers truly maddening. “The reality is, the Afghan people did not stand up to the Taliban … They bear some responsibility for the condition they’re in,” Kreindler & Kreindler partner Andrew Maloney told the BBC (as Fang notes). In reality, the reason the Taliban rule today is because the American puppet state—which the U.S. spent some $2.3 trillion trying to prop up—was so unpopular, incompetent, and corrupt that it collapsed the very instant it faced a mild challenge. (And I would like to see some doughy middle-aged American attorneys take up arms or even speak out against Taliban troops.)
Complaints from the administration that the money is tied up in litigation are also unconvincing. The White House chose to siphon off $3.5 billion by itself; it could have picked a smaller number for 9/11 families, or simply declined to seize it in the first place. It even probably could have talked any of about a dozen U.S. allies into restoring the funds to the Afghan central bank as a favor. The European Union in particular is not keen on another refugee crisis. Seven billion dollars, by way of comparison, is about half a week’s worth of the American military budget.
On another level, it is frankly true that handing the reserves over would help the Taliban. Doing anything to help the Afghan people will shore up Taliban rule, because they currently rule the country, and will therefore get some credit for any improvement in conditions.
Sometimes political leadership requires facing unpleasant facts. There are two options facing the Biden administration: either remove its hands from the throat of the Afghan economy, and admit that there’s no better option than letting the Taliban do as best they can (as America tolerates in so many other repressive regimes); or continue the throttling until thousands or very possibly millions die, greatly strengthening the position of the Taliban’s likeliest successors, namely, ISIS.
The fact that this is being done in part so a bunch of lawyers in Northern Virginia can add another zero to their bank accounts shows how pointless an exercise it all is. Unless Biden reverses course, ends the sanctions, and finds some way to restore the functioning of the Afghan central bank, he could easily end up killing an order of magnitude more Afghans than died in 20 years of war, for no reason other than political cowardice and grubby corruption."
It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably.
The story is told with a grin, like it’s a joke. That’s how you know it’s deadly serious. Look at this ridiculous war, the marine is telling you, and look at me, with my American flag on my shoulder, trying to make sense of it. It suggests the element of the American psyche that Ralph Ellison called “an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality.”
Since the fall of Kabul, though, the gap between appearance and reality has shrunk, bringing many long-running jokes to an end. The joke of generals boasting about how much progress has been made training the Afghan army. The joke of the intelligence community predicting how long the Afghan government could resist the Taliban. The joke of our promises to Afghan allies that, if worst comes to worst, we’d protect them, give them visas, and reunite them with their families somewhere safe.
Instead the Taliban walked into cities unopposed; the President of Afghanistan fled the country; and crowds of desperate Afghans surrounded an American C-17 cargo plane as it took off from Kabul, some so desperate that they clung to the landing gear as it lifted. Videos show an Afghan falling from the sky. News reports tell of human remains later found in the wheel well of one of the planes.
How does it feel, as a veteran who watched the Iraqi province where I served fall to isis, to now watch this country—where marines I knew were shot or blown up or killed—fall to the Taliban? Who cares? As the Taliban goes house to house looking for those Afghans who believed in us, and who had the physical courage to put that belief to the test, who cares how I feel? Who cares how the vets who battled alcohol addiction only to start drinking again this week are feeling? Who cares what my marine friends are feeling as they receive frantic text messages from Afghans allies? Not, for sure, Americans for the last twenty years.
“Everyone wants to know, am I O.K., and I’m, like, ‘Really?’ ” a friend who served in Afghanistan during Obama’s brief surge told me. “Is the burden of feeling guilty about this also a burden veterans have to carry, too? Not only did you not care about Afghanistan, not only did you not follow Afghanistan, it’s like you gave such a little shit you can’t even feel bad yourself? Could somebody else please take some of this, take some responsibility? I’m so fucking tired of it and it’s killing me and it shouldn’t be fucking me up this much.”
Dane Sawyer, a veteran who served with Afghans in an Army civil-affairs unit, wrote to me of his effort to save Afghans. “I have had no success despite all of the forms I’ve completed, phone calls I’ve made, and emails I’ve sent. It feels oddly familiar.” He’s been working with a family of eight who have been camping outside the Kabul airport for four days, with a family near Herat sending messages every morning asking whether they can go to Kabul, with a single mother waiting in Kabul for a call to go to the airport, and others. “I wish I could turn a blind eye but the messages I am getting are so utterly desperate and harrowing, but I know soon I will have to just tell people there is nothing more I can do.”
But I don’t want to talk about how veterans are feeling now. And it’s not for me to say how Afghans are feeling, or what America looks like to them as the C-17s lift off and leave them behind. I want to talk about how Americans felt, twenty years ago, when all this began.
I don’t have sharp memories of the attacks themselves, in part because I mostly missed them. I’d been in the woods, disconnected, cheerfully oblivious while the whole nation watched the buildings go down again and again on television, uncertain of what could happen next, of how many more planes were in the sky, what other buildings were about to be hit, and who else might die. When I emerged from nature, the national mood had reached a fever pitch. There was grief mixed with fear and rage, yes, but there was something else. Something dangerously seductive. America had found moral purpose again.
Soon, George W. Bush’s approval rating was more than eighty-five per cent, Rudy Giuliani was “America’s Mayor,” and overseas America was a subject of sympathy and support. I’ve heard people speak almost wistfully of those days. If you weren’t a Muslim being harassed or spied on by the police, it was easy to feel a deep sense of connection to your fellow-countrymen, a pride in being American, and a knowledge that we’d get through this, we’d grieve, we’d rebuild, we’d get revenge, and we’d change the world in the process.
Let’s admit it: those days felt good. Not for my friends who lost family in the attacks. Not for the woman I know who barely made it out of the towers and has spent the past twenty years wondering why she survived and so many of her colleagues did not. But for most of the rest of us, our country was justifiably at war. War with noble purpose. “Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age,” quipped Christopher Hitchens. A brutal Taliban regime was ending. Women were going to school. Men were shaving their beards and looking, in wonder, at their naked faces in the mirror. No wonder Iraq, suffering under the boot of a truly evil dictator, began to look inviting.
A buddy of mine, the journalist and veteran Jacob Siegel, recently admitted to having an instinctive recoil against men our age who didn’t serve in the military. “It’s unfair, but I feel that,” he said. “Who excused you, you know? Or another way of putting that would be, Why did you think you had a choice? I know it’s a volunteer army but, the volunteer army is a trick question, you know? You’re supposed to say yes if you have any honor.”
More of us veterans feel that than we publicly admit. The voice in our heads whispering, If you had honor, you joined. You went to make the world safe. To plant peace in long-suffering nations, with no selfish ends to serve, desiring no conquest, no dominion. We were told that we were the champions of the rights of mankind.
