Six on History: Afghanistan
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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.
The United States’ hasty, ill-planned withdrawal was one last favor for the Taliban.
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.
The 20-year conflict was a boon to the military-industrial complex, at the cost of untold lives.
"The scenes at the Kabul airport are heart-wrenching. The great Western retreat from Afghanistan is panicked, messy, graceless.
Not just the Western nationals remaining in the war-torn country that just fell back under the Taliban control, and the at-risk Afghans wanting desperately to flee their homeland, even United States President Joe Biden has no idea how things will play out.
Let alone the worried leaders of US allies who ordered their countries' troops into the "graveyard of empires" two decades ago following Washington's lead.
Since the US president has turned down the other G7 leaders' plea for keeping US military presence at the Kabul airport beyond the Aug 31 deadline, and the Taliban have also said it will accept "no extensions" to the deadline, things could get uglier, messier in the next few days.
Before the moment of truth befalls on Tuesday, these days could be as grueling to Biden as to those vying for a way out.
Despite Biden's argument that the pullout is something he inherited from an incompetent predecessor, there is no excuse for the disastrous way the drawdown is being implemented. As commander-in-chief, he can't escape blame for at least some of the errors in judgment and decision-making.
But the damage to Biden's personal political career will be negligible compared with the damage that has been done to the US' image as a trustworthy, reliable ally and partner.
Although his and the previous US administration are worth credit for finally moving to stop the bleeding from an open wound, the way the withdrawal has been conducted is irresponsible and contrary to the US' claimed commitment to its international obligations, to the people of Afghanistan, its allies, and to the international community as a whole.
The US president's insistence on honoring the end-of-the-month deadline, resulting from fear of terrorist attacks, may be a sign of personal weakness or the decline of US might and global leadership. But it will define the America that Biden said "is back".
The America Biden has brought back to the world stage under the banner of multilateralism is no longer the liberal internationalist the international community was accustomed to. It no doubt is interested in working with allies and partners on matters of common concern, but, as was evident at the latest G7 virtual summit, it is decidedly more self-centered.
While Biden's approach to the broader spectrum of international affairs remains behind a veil of mystery, US allies and partners may be the first to re-examine their approach to Biden's America."
"In the spring of 1996, Owais Tohid, a well-known Pakistani journalist, travelled around Afghanistan speaking to Taliban fighters and commanders. The west didn’t understand them, they told him again and again. “Americans have the clocks,” a young Talib quoted Mullah Omar, “but we have the time.”
The United States and their Nato partners had technology and weapons, but the Taliban were fighting for their home. For all their sophistry, the west had no persistence. The west’s arrogance hasn’t changed much, no matter the case, they imagine that they can land their military might on top of a political terrain and forever transform it. But violence has never worked, not once, in all the United States’ misadventures – it didn’t work in Vietnam, Laos, Korea, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan.
The Vietnamese believed the same thing during their war with the United States: as long as we persist, we win. Ho Chi Minh said: “You can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.” Persistence. The Vietnamese and the Taliban controlled time, and ultimately victory, because the idea of home will always be a stronger force than military might, technology or violence.
Occupiers can only have temporary power, eventually they have to leave. They have to go back somewhere. But men fighting for their home cannot be defeated. You give them no choice, they have to fight you. They have nowhere else to go, nowhere to retreat to.
This is a lesson the feverish colonisers of the west cannot seem to learn: the concept of home, not violence, is how wars are won. The west’s profound misunderstanding of Islam – and proud refusal to learn anything about it as they launched wars all over the Muslim world over the last two decades – coupled with this ignorance is what made defeat in Afghanistan inevitable."
Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani author of fiction and non-fiction. Her novel The Runaways was published last year by Verso Books
Stephen Wertheim: ‘Biden made the right decision’
"Kabul’s fall to the Taliban is a horrific event, one that augurs more horrors to come. The United States betrayed the Afghans it protected, particularly women and girls, by promising them a Taliban-free future that it could never fulfill.
What is unfolding in Afghanistan is so tragic that it ought to represent the worst possible outcome. And yet, one alternative was worse still: continuing the US war effort. That would have meant sending more US service members to kill and be killed for the sole purpose of slowing the Afghan government’s defeat. Such a course would have hurt Americans without ultimately helping Afghans. For Joe Biden, it was unacceptable.
Biden made a correct and important decision to withdraw US ground troops, even though the immediate humanitarian impact has been even worse than anticipated. For most of the two-decade conflict, the United States fought an unnecessary war for an unachievable objective. It aimed to build a centralized, western-style state in a country that had no such thing, and it tried to make that state, despite being dependent on external support, somehow become independent. The swift collapse of the Afghan security forces confirms what the administration had concluded: no further amount of time or effort would have produced a substantially better result.
For Americans, a first step – essential to avoiding future disasters – is to come to terms with defeat instead of indulging the fantasy that somehow, in some way, an unwinnable war could have been won."
Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy
"Since it invaded Afghanistan, the US has fueled corruption in Afghanistan through CIA and military deliveries of bags of cash to Afghan power brokers and a system of bribes to ensure US troops remained fed and supplied. Absurdly, the US government has spent billions paying the Taliban not to attack convoys supplying troops sent to fight the Taliban.
The vast majority of the $2.3tn the US government has spent or obligated for the war has gone not to Afghans – corrupt or otherwise – but to US military contractors (and those who bought US debt): a reported 80–90% of US outlays ended up back in the US as a “massive wealth transfer” from taxpayers to firms in the military industrial complex, which have seen their profits and stock prices skyrocket.
Beyond President Eisenhower’s worst nightmares, the military industrial complex has become defined by spiraling expenditures, fraud, and contracts lacking incentives to control costs. To keep the funding flowing, contractors have paid Washington DC lobbyists millions and made millions more in campaign contributions to Congress members who have inflated military budgets beyond cold war highs.
The military industrial complex has become a system of largely legalized corruption revolving around entrenched incentives to wage endless war for financial and political gain. If we don’t end this system and the corrupting belief that war is a legitimate and useful policy tool, the United States will keep fighting endless wars."
David Vine is Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. Vine is the director of the American University Public Anthropology Clinic and a board member of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The views expressed here are Vine’s alone
"Joe Biden was dealt a bad hand on Afghanistan. But instead of modifying the withdrawal timeline or ensuring close military-to-military coordination with the Afghan government, he saw Afghanistan as a nuisance to be done away with as soon as possible. After all, he had been complaining about American involvement since Barack Obama’s first term, when as vice-president he favored a near exclusive focus on counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaida.
It is little surprise, then, that Biden and his top aides seemed indifferent as the Taliban marched toward Kabul. This wasn’t their fight. Indifference is one thing. Cruelty is another. In his speech on Monday, Biden showed his trademark stubbornness, refusing to admit fault or responsibility. Moreover, he blamed Afghans for lacking the will to fight for their own future, despite over 60,000 Afghan military and security forces having perished in precisely that fight over 20 years.
It may be tempting to dismiss this as an unfortunate but understandable logistical failure. If only. Optics matter. Narratives matter. Is this how America treats its friends and allies when it grows tired of them? This is the question on minds of officials in foreign capitals everywhere. As Politico Europe reported, “Even those who cheered Biden’s election and believed he could ease the recent tensions in the transatlantic relationship said they regarded the withdrawal from Afghanistan as nothing short of a mistake of historic magnitude.” Even if this isn’t how European officials and others should interpret Biden’s nonchalance, they are perceiving it nonetheless. And perceptions – or misperceptions – have a way of creating new, darker realities."
Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World
Haroun Dada: ‘Life for Kabul’s elite wasn’t the same as rural Afghans’
"When analyzing the US and the Ghani administration’s failures and the Taliban’s success, it is critical that we understand rural Afghans’ victimhood at the hands of US and Nato forces. These forces maimed, tortured and killed rural Afghans, their limbs collected for sport. They went so far as to define innocent, teenage boys as “enemy combatants” to justify their crimes and falsify statistics.
But in addition to understanding the US and Nato forces’ war crimes, we must understand why capital and democratic processes rarely reached rural Afghans. This will allow us to understand why it was that they could so easily undermine the Ghani administration’s legitimacy.
Ghani did not represent Afghanistan – 923,592 Afghans, that’s 2.5% of the population, voted for him. Only 4.75% of the population felt engaged and/or safe enough to even vote in the last election.
Furthermore, Kabul and other Afghan cities are not representative of where Afghans live – 28 million of the total 38 million Afghans live in rural areas. The urban elite are not representative of Afghans – 80% of Afghans rely on rain-fed agriculture and cattle-grazing for their incomes.
Appalling levels of economic, social and political inequality persist between urban and rural Afghans. This inequality is a known fact; it only took the Taliban, in a manner similar to communists in the 1970s, to exploit it and overthrow Ghani’s administration.
As we reflect on the war in Afghanistan, it’s crucial that we incorporate the urban-rural divide, which considers class, ethnicity and other socio-economic factors, into our understanding and assessment of the current state of Afghanistan – the Taliban already do."
Haroun Dada is an Afghan American based in Chicago. He currently works as a management consultant
- Moira Donegan: ‘Neocons used women’s suffering for the invasion’
"In the weeks and months after 9/11, all sorts of justifications were proposed for the predetermined invasion of Afghanistan. One of the pretexts on offer was the Taliban’s treatment of women, which, before the American intervention, was indeed brutal and tyrannical. The neoconservative elite then in power used Afghan women’s suffering as a moral shield, claiming that feminists should back the invasion.
It was a cynical bit of PR, though it did succeed in persuading some American feminists to wave the flag. In practice, the neoconservatives largely ignored the feminist movement’s substantive concerns in Afghanistan, and actively worked against their goals domestically. Their commitment to women’s rights was always a matter of pretense, not principle."
Now, after the spectacular failure of the American occupation and the return of Taliban rule, feminists have become a convenient scapegoat for the invasion. Renewed feminist concerns about the Taliban’s violent oppression of women are being cast as imperialist, rather than humanitarian – a point of view that ignores the perspectives of Afghan women themselves, who have been vocal about their alarm. Meanwhile, the politicians who were actually responsible for the invasion have faced no accountability, or even had their reputations rehabilitated.
But where western feminists do bear responsibility is in their failure to comprehend Afghan women’s oppression as related to, though different from, their own. In discussions of the Taliban, western feminists tended to exoticize the group’s culturally specific forms of male supremacy (notably, the enforced burka) rather than emphasizing the connections between the Taliban’s logic of misogyny and that professed by women’s oppressors in the west, including those who perpetrated the 2001 invasion. If western feminists want to build a truly global feminist movement, they will need to approach their Afghan counterparts with solidarity, not paternalism."Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
