President
Joe Biden, in announcing an ostensible end to the U.S. war in
Afghanistan, is continuing his streak of paying eloquent lip service
to progressive causes while maintaining the implied status quo. In a
televised
address
from the White House on April 14, Biden said,
“it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s
time for American troops to come home.” But just a day later,
the New
York Times
reported without a hint of irony that “the Pentagon, American
spy agencies and Western allies are refining plans to deploy a less
visible but still potent force in the region.” This means we
are ending the war, but not really.
U.S.
military leaders and generals gave a much more accurate assessment of
the war's future in the days following Biden's speech. Former CIA
officer and counterterrorism expert Marc Polymeropoulos explained to
the Times, "What we are talking about are how to collect
intelligence and then act against terrorist targets without any
infrastructure or personnel in the country other than essentially the
embassy in Kabul." In other words, the U.S. wants to wage a
remotely run war against Afghanistan, as it has done in other nations
like Yemen, Syria, and Somalia.
Defense
Secretary Lloyd Austin added his two cents, underscoring the U.S.’s
ability to wage war without troops on the ground, saying, “There’s
probably not a space on the globe that the United States and its
allies can’t reach.” Marine
Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr.
echoed this sentiment in ominous terms on April 20 at a House Armed
Services Committee hearing, saying, “if we’re going to
strike something [in Afghanistan], we’re going to strike it in
concert with the law of armed conflict and the American way of war.”
One
may suppose that this “American way of war” is unlike a
traditional war where troops occupy a country—a type of war
that is generally deeply unpopular with the U.S. public. By publicly
promising a withdrawal of troops while quietly continuing airstrikes,
Biden ensures that U.S. violence against Afghanistan remains
invisible to the American people.
Biden
also failed to mention in his speech that there are tens of thousands
of private military contractors employed in Afghanistan. According to
the Times, “[m]ore than 16,000 civilian contractors, including
over 6,000 Americans, now provide security, logistics and other
support in Afghanistan.” The Times did not see fit to ask how
the war can be declared over if mercenaries remain on the ground, nor
how Biden can declare the war as ending if airstrikes will continue.
Dr.
Hakeem Naim is an Afghan American lecturer in the Department of
History at the University of California, Berkeley; he was raised in
Afghanistan and has lived in multiple countries as a refugee and
immigrant before moving to the U.S. In an interview,
he explained what Biden refused to mention: that "the U.S.
created chaos by supporting the most corrupt elite groups and created
a mafia-system of the economy run by the drug lords, warlords, and
contractors." Worst of all, "the Taliban is back in power,"
he said, implying that Afghanistan is essentially back where it
started in 2001.
Fahima
Gaheez,
the director of the Afghan Women’s Fund, concurred with Naim,
saying that “the U.S. made a bigger mess in Afghanistan and
lost too many opportunities to help Afghans to fix the problems that
the U.S. itself created 40 years ago.” She was referring to the
CIA
arming of Afghan mujahideen
warlords against the Soviet Union, which invaded and occupied
Afghanistan in the late 1970s.
In
other words, our destructive involvement in Afghanistan predates by
decades the post-9/11 invasion and occupation that continues to this
day. Instead of owning up to the havoc, we have wreaked in
Afghanistan, Biden wants credit for withdrawing U.S. troops from a
war we have been involved in since the 1970s (not 2001), and that
will most certainly not end by September 11, 2021.
Today,
according to Dr. Naim, “the CIA has thousands of militias
operating in Afghanistan, and there are still thousands of
contractors whose objective Afghans don’t even know.” He
summarized, “It’s going to be very naive and simplistic
to think that the war will end.” Gaheez, who has traveled to
Afghanistan numerous times to oversee humanitarian aid projects, has
seen firsthand what the private contractors represent. She said,
“they have CIA clearance and weapons, and they can be used as a
partial military force.” In fact, the private military
contractors outnumber U.S. troops by so much that more
contractors than soldiers have died.
The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR),
a watchdog agency, warned
that the pullout of contractors could have worse consequences than
the withdrawal of troops.
The
most disingenuous aspect of Biden’s speech was his insistence
that the U.S. had a simple goal in Afghanistan and met it. He said,
“We went to Afghanistan in 2001 to root out al Qaeda, to
prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned
from Afghanistan,” and that “[o]ur objective was clear.”
But the U.S. did far more than that. It cobbled together a puppet
government,
foisted
its idea of democracy
onto a people struggling with U.S.-backed armed warlords and thus
ensured that secular democratic movements remained weak. It poured
billions into fighting
a drug war,
only to end up encouraging
drug production.
It defeated
the Taliban only to choose the rebel group as a
partner for peace.
Along the way, it killed
more than 40,000 Afghan civilians—most
likely an underestimate.
Today,
although there is an Afghan government in power headed by President
Ashraf Ghani, it is entirely dependent on the U.S. for legitimacy and
remains at the mercy of Taliban-led
violence
as well as armed
fundamentalist warlords
that successive American administrations and the government
itself have legitimized.
But
none of that was important enough for Biden to mention. Instead, the
president claimed
that in 2001, “The cause was just… And I supported that
military action.” Then, encompassing the disastrous war into a
single simplistic sentence, Biden claimed, “We delivered
justice to bin Laden a decade ago, and we’ve stayed in
Afghanistan for a decade since.”
With
these words, the president offered a tantalizing characterization of
the Afghan war: that the U.S. intended to root out terrorism, that
the task was achieved, and that we should have left soon after. It is
a comforting thought to reimagine the Afghanistan war through such a
benevolent lens—as if our only gaffe was that we stayed too
long. Biden also made absolutely no mention of the fact that bin
Laden was captured and killed in Pakistan,
not Afghanistan.
Missing
from the political dialogue over the war is just how obscenely we
have paid to fight this futile 20-year battle that will leave
Afghanistan in the hands of a corrupt and ineffectual government and
a newly empowered Taliban force and other warlords and militias.
According to the Costs
of War project
run by Brown University, American taxpayers forked over more than
$2.2 trillion for a war in Afghanistan that Biden wants us to believe
achieved its objective by assassinating bin Laden a decade ago in
Pakistan.
At
a time when inequality continues to rise in the U.S. and politicians
claim there is no money to fund
infrastructure projects
or a Green
New Deal
or Medicare
for All,
the costs of the Afghan war will continue to rise in both economic
and human terms. Taxpayers will continue to foot the bill for
airstrikes and private contractors with no end in sight. Afghans will
continue to suffer and die.
Seen
through such a lens, Dr. Naim gave an accurate impression of Biden’s
speech as simply, “a colonialist and orientalist justification
of an intervention.”
This
article was produced by Economy
for All,
a
project of the Independent Media Institute.
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