Americans have
been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to
flee the Taliban’s return to power in their country – and
then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre
by U.S. forces that together killed
at
least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.
Even as UN
agencies
warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S.
Treasury
has frozen
nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign
currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will
desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide
basic services.
Under pressure
from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund
decided
not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent
to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus
pandemic.
The U.S. and
other Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to
Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August 24,
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding
aid
and recognition gave them “very considerable leverage –
economic, diplomatic and political” over the Taliban.
Western
politicians couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they
are clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some
power in the new government, and that Western influence and interests
in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return. This
leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds, and euros, but it
will be paid for in Afghan lives.
To read or
listen to Western analysts, one would think that the United States
and its allies’ 20-year war was a benign and beneficial effort
to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and provide
healthcare, education and good jobs, and that this has all now been
swept away by capitulation to the Taliban.
The
reality is quite different, and not so hard to understand. The United
States spent
$2.26 trillion
on its war in Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country
should have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of
those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric
military spending to maintain the U.S. military occupation, drop
over 80,000
bombs and missiles on Afghans, pay
private contractors, and transport troops, weapons and military
equipment back and forth around the world for 20 years.
Since the
United States fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost
half a trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will
continue far into the future. Medical and disability costs for U.S.
soldiers wounded in Afghanistan already amount to over $175 billion,
and they will likewise keep mounting as the soldiers age. Medical and
disability costs for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could
eventually top a trillion dollars.
So what about
“rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated
$144 billion
for reconstruction in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that
was spent to recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security
forces” that have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to
their villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent
between 2008 and 2017 was documented as “waste, fraud and
abuse” by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction.
The crumbs
left over, less than 2% of total U.S. spending on Afghanistan, amount
to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to the
Afghan people in economic development, healthcare, education,
infrastructure and humanitarian aid.
But,
as
in Iraq,
the government the U.S. installed in Afghanistan was notoriously
corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and systemic
over time. Transparency International (TI) has consistently ranked
U.S.-occupied Afghanistan as among the most corrupt countries in the
world.
Western
readers may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in
Afghanistan, as opposed to a particular feature of the U.S.
occupation, but this is not the case. TI
notes
that, “it is widely recognized that the scale of corruption in
the post-2001 period has increased over previous levels.” A
2009
report
by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned
that “corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous
administrations.”
Those
administrations would include the Taliban government that U.S.
invasion forces removed from power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied
socialist governments
that were overthrown by the U.S.-deployed precursors of Al Qaeda and
the Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they
had made in education, healthcare and women’s rights.
A 2010 report
by former Reagan Pentagon official Anthony H. Cordesman, entitled
“How America Corrupted Afghanistan”, chastised the U.S.
government for throwing gobs of money into that country with
virtually no accountability.
The New
York Times
reported
in 2013 that every month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off
suitcases, backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with U.S.
dollars for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.
Corruption
also undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up
as the successes of the occupation, like education and healthcare.
The education system has been riddled
with schools, teachers, and students that exist only on paper. Afghan
pharmacies are stocked
with fake, expired or low quality medicines, many smuggled in from
neighboring Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by
civil servants like teachers earning only
one-tenth
the salaries of better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and
contractors.
Rooting out
corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary to
the primary U.S. goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining or
extending its puppet government’s control. As
TI reported,
“The U.S. has intentionally paid different armed groups and
Afghan civil servants to ensure cooperation and/or information, and
cooperated with governors regardless of how corrupt they were…
Corruption has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling
grievances against the Afghan government and channelling material
support to the insurgency.”
The
endless
violence
of the U.S. occupation and the corruption of the U.S.-backed
government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially in
rural areas where three
quarters
of Afghans live. The intractable poverty of occupied Afghanistan also
contributed to the Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned
how their occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and
its Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.
Well before
the current crisis, the number
of Afghans
reporting that they were struggling to live on their current income
increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018
Gallup poll
found the lowest levels of self-reported “well-being”
that Gallup has ever recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only
reported record levels of misery but also unprecedented hopelessness
about their future.
Despite some
gains in education for girls, only a third of
Afghan girls
attended primary school in 2019 and only 37%
of adolescent Afghan girls
were literate. One reason that so few children go to school in
Afghanistan is that more than
two million children
between the ages of 6 and 14 have to work to support their
poverty-stricken families.
Yet instead of
atoning for our role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty,
Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic and
humanitarian aid that was funding
three quarters
of Afghanistan’s public sector and made up 40% of its total
GDP.
In effect, the
United States and its allies are responding to losing the war by
threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a second,
economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give in to their
“leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will
starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing famine
and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame other
victims of U.S. economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran.
After pouring
trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s
main duty now is to help the 40 million Afghans who have not fled
their country, as they try to recover from the terrible wounds and
trauma of the war America inflicted on them, as well as a massive
drought
that devastated 40% of their crops this year and a crippling third
wave
of covid-19.
The U.S.
should release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in U.S. banks.
It should shift the $6
billion
allocated for the now defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian
aid, instead of diverting it to other forms of wasteful military
spending. It should encourage European allies and the IMF
not to withhold funds. Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021
appeal for $1.3
billion
in emergency aid, which as of late August was less than 40% funded.
Once upon a
time, the United States helped its British and Soviet allies to
defeat Germany and Japan, and then helped to rebuild them as healthy,
peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s serious
faults – its racism, its crimes against humanity in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer countries –
America held up a promise of prosperity that people in many countries
around the world were ready to follow.
If all the
United States has to offer other countries today is the war,
corruption and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is
wise to be moving on and looking at new models to follow: new
experiments in popular and social democracy; renewed emphasis on
national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to the use
of military force to resolve international problems; and more
equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle global crises
like the Covid pandemic and the climate disaster.
The
United States can either stumble on in its fruitless attempt to
control the world through militarism and coercion, or it can use this
opportunity to rethink its place in the world. Americans should be
ready to turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see
how we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future
that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must help
to build.
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