I’ve found this sketch of a street scene in Qandahar (home of the Taliban) that I made while hitch-hiking through Afghanistan back in the time of its last king.
We thought we now had a humane president. But “Joe Biden’s honeymoon is over,” as a friend recently said.
In October 2001 America, to root out the 9/11 terrorists, invaded Afghanistan and, with the help of its NATO allies Canada, Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the plucky Northern Alliance of Afghans, deposed the Taliban (“students”). Most Afghans welcomed the intervention. They were starving, and they had had enough of brutal theocratic rule. For twenty years, Afghans’ nutrition, health, education, and human rights improved. There was negotiation between the elected government and the remnants of the Taliban toward power sharing.
But in April 2021 NATO began to withdraw some of its troops – and the Taliban insurgency began again, In July Biden announced that American troops would be completely out by the end of August. Military chiefs warned that it was a huge mistake. Surrender to the Taliban. They overran the country and captured Kabul on August 15.
There was not enough time for the thousands who would suffer reprisals to escape – the tens of thousands who had cooperated with the Western countries and with international aid organizations and with the fallen government.
Their only way out was the Kabul airport. To reach it they had to get past four Taliban checkpoints, where they often were beaten with rifle butts and electric cables, or shot.
Desperate people – the suspects and their families – are queuing, for days, outside the airport gate. They stand night-long shoulder to shoulder. You can guess what the stench of “rubbish” is that has been mentioned. Some have to crowd in an open sewage canal. Shots have been fired into the crowds. People have died in stampedes. Children have been trampled underfoot. People have nothing but the last clothes they put on and sometimes a backpack. That’s how professors or porters hope to start a life in some far land. Some have received by email, presumably on their phones, notices of eligibility for resettlement, but cannot get near enough to where they were told to show them, or get there and wait seven hours for an appointment that isn’t kept. Some have thrown their infants over the gate to American soldiers. Inside the airport, chaos too. Are there any flight controllers? People have clung to the wheels of aircraft and fallen to their death.
People are being advised not to try for the airport but for some land route out. Along Taliban-held roads and across towering mountain ranges to Pakistan or Uzbekistan, or hundreds of miles of deserts to Iran?
Sentimental English people have taken seriously the story of Paul Farthing, who founded an animal shelter in Kabul and is fighting to get his several hundred rescued dogs and cats out to safety, perhaps by chartered plane. It’s a small symbol. Dedicated people go into counties where animals, or lepers, or cross-gender people suffer and work to relieve their suffering. For such stuff, inhumane regimes have no tolerance.
The only force capable of maintaining order at the airport so that the refugees can continue to be airlifted out is the American force that is still there. Members of Britain’s Parliament are indignant that the deadline for withdrawal will not be extended. Prime minister Johnson used the opportunity of the G7 summit meeting on August 24 to plead with Biden to extend it. Biden refused. He snubs his allies, kowtows to the Taliban.
The Taliban spokesman declared that if the “occupation” continues a day beyond August 31 there will be “consequences.” The Taliban should be told that if they go on hunting house-to-house for former government workers and judges and rights workers and aid workers and politicians, or resume confining women to home and lack of education, and chopping off the hands of accused thieves, there will be consequences: freezing of the billions of dollars of aid that outside countries have set aside for rescuing Afghanistan’s economy.
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The plan under the Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeld regime was to cause as much chaos throughout the middle east as possible, targeting any regime that was not willing to submit to the international banking system controlled by the U.S. To them, *stability* was the enemy. As Julian Assange noted in 2011, the U.S. objective of going into Afghanistan was to drain the tax base of American and European citizens and transfer the money to the military-industrial complex, meaning that the goal was “endless war” not “winning the war.” All the talk about 9/11 or human rights or freedom or democracy or girls in school was just propaganda that the politicians never believed in to get people to go along with their plans.
I am happy that the scales have began falling from your friends’ eyes in terms of who they voted for as president. Hidin’ Biden is living up to his reputation earned during the 2020 election.
Given that his predecessor was impeached for a phone call and a temporary pause of arms deliveries to an ally, I look forward o the impeachment of Biden for an actual humanitarian calamity at his hands, including injury, upheaval and death of citizens from around the world in Kabul, plus his actual arming of the Taliban by abandoning weapons and hardware effectively paid for by taxing US citizens. His V.P. is cowardly hiding meantime.
An absolute disgrace that need not have happened. And Biden seems more concerned with passing the buck and hiding behind his “Lids” which his supporters once found to be so charming.
Biden’s mistake was to continue Trump’s policy of bringing the troops out ASAP, for domestic political reasons.
Biden’s mistake was not following Trump’s withdrawal policy by ignoring violations of its conditions for an orderly draw down. He would not have closed Bagrahm AFB so swiftly while the enemy was taking over the country, and he would not be seeking terrorists’ permission to evacuate citizens and others (greencard holders etc.) that Biden’s plan left stranded. Biden’s Aug 30 deadline and ignorance of the fool hearty decision to only leave Kabul Airport open led to the deadliest day in Afghanistan in over a decade. Biden’s other huge mistake was ending Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy by opening the floodgates allowing illegals to fan out across the nation during a pandemic.
That is a vivid sketch! I feel like I’m right there.
I’m reluctant to comment on the current situation in Afghanistan, because I’m deeply conflicted. On the one hand I deeply regret what is happening to the Afghan people. On the other hand, the United States and NATO have been at war in Afghanistan for 20 years, almost all the foreign aid was stolen by corrupt Afghan officials and secreted outside the country, and the Afghan military has never had the will to fight.
Regardless of how one defines a US / NATO victory in Afghanistan, George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq diverted so many military, diplomatic, and economic resources that defeat in Afghanistan became inevitable.
No matter how long they stayed, sooner or later US troops were going to withdraw from Afghanistan, and the Taliban were going to come down from the hills into the cities. When Biden met with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in July, Ghani pleaded with Biden not to accelerate the process of granting exit visas, because it would display a lack of confidence in the Afghan government. Then a month later when the Taliban were heading toward Kabul, Ghani flew to the United Arab Emirates, where he has enough stolen money to live in luxury for the rest of his life.
Maybe the US could have done marginally better at withdrawing from Afghanistan, but even the most perfectly timed and executed withdrawal was going to be messy and tragic.
I forgot to click the button to be notified of new comments.
The lead editorial in this week’s _Science_ magazine, entitled “The Will to Fight”, was written by Scott Atran, a scholar who studies modern warfare and public policy. The editorial cites research which consistently demonstrates what common sense already knows: “Insurgents willing to sacrifice for their cause have often prevailed with far less firepower and manpower than opposing state forces that mainly relied on material incentives such as pay and punishment.”
Here is Atran’s final paragraph:
“By failing to recognize limits on the ability to impose on other cultures values that have taken many years to attain gradually in its own culture, the United States and its partners will continue the unsound habit of approaching problems by building up the wrong kinds of allies and armies—weakly modeled in America’s image but devoid of the spirit that can only arise from one’s own values and cultures. To honor Western democratic values by example, advancing them through financial, media, and moral alliances, and using force only to defend rather than dispense, is a surer way forward.”
The full text can be found here:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl9949
I can’t help hoping that the resisters in the Panjshir valley prevail despite “far less firepower and manpower than opposing state forces” of the Taliban.
Cultures’ values do not improve solely by internal evolution. There are copious examples of cultures admiring and borrowing elements of others: Rome adopting elements of Greek culture; Navajos adopting elements of Pueblo culture… The adoption may be at first, and may remain, partial and by an elite, but may become thorough. Otherwise Britain would still be in the Dark Ages (as some Islamic regimes are). Many Afghans, if a minority, had become addicted to education and equality.
I can imagine the howling of the media if this had been done by the former administration. Remember the cartoon from the election,
“Why win when not losing is safer?” It is now national policy under Joe. https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.f5efba23ef6b4e4b380f0441a84cc62f?rik=tJ5GmKf3cZztNg&riu=http%3a%2f%2fwww.jewishworldreview.com%2fcarics%2fbiden_loser_slogan.jpg&ehk=ez3g%2f%2fFlRLeyktUasWQYTgkAQ9AU7GqYZjzAHtj3c6c%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0
Guy —
In one of the more rational analyses of the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan that I have heard so far, it was suggested that “nation building” — if it can (or should) be accomplished at all — is a multi-generational process, and we have been there for only one. In order for Western-oriented reforms to “take,” it was further suggested, we needed to be there for the long haul, several generations, at least. At that point, those who had grown up with nontraditional values and perspectives would begin to assume positions of real authority in their country, and things would finally begin to change. The great tragedy, or so it seems to me, is not only that so many lives are being lost, but that the “seeds” of reform in Afghan society are now being scattered to the winds* and there seems to be little if any prospect that they will be replanted there in our lifetime. Instead, it is speculated that this country’s penchant for chaos and corruption will only be further exploited by China, Pakistan, and other powers seeking to take control of their mineral riches.
*Their sowers now being airlifted out of the county, to the extent that they are allowed to, as we watch in disbelief on TV.
The dilemma for sensitive people in the West — such as yourself, I think — and in the United States in particular, is whether or not we wanted to assume the “sorrows of empire” and remain in a care-taking capacity in Afghanistan for the requisite amount of time to effect some positive changes (if such is possible or even desirable) in their society. The alternative, as we are witnessing, is the carnage at the Kabul airport and the prospect of thousands and thousands of innocent people dying at the hands of savage, tribal-oriented fundamentalists who harbor none of our Western values with respect to the worth and dignity of each and every individual life.
So — should we have opted for cynical expediency and abandoned the people of Afghanistan to their fate, or should we have swallowed hard and settled in for a long and problematic occupation? My feeling, now, is that we ought to have taken the road less traveled, made the necessary sacrifices, and settled in to see if the next younger generation of Afghans, under our tutelage,
would accept a more Western perspective about the value of a federated (taking into account their historic regional / tribal differences) secular government, human rights, and the rule of law.
(Paradoxically, these same Western / “white” values are now being denounced by many people in the United States — cf, Critical Race Theory — and the very people who profess such concern for “human rights” in Afghanistan and other places now want to obviate the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Rule of Law in this country so that their woke, statist utopia might be put in place.)
Similarly, it is pointed out — probably correctly — that the systemic corruption in Afghan society is matched — if not exceeded — by the rapacity of the US military-Corporate-Congressional Complex for continued profits from our nation-building adventures abroad. This kind of corruption is, has, and always will be part of the “price” that must be paid for “helping” the most vulnerable people in Afghanistan and in other places, and it may be too high for some.
Finally, at the same time that the tragedy of Afghanistan is playing itself out, there is the equally heart-rending tragedy of Haiti, which poses similar unanswerable questions about what other nations ought to “do” to help them. After yet another attempted political coup and the devastating one-two punch of an earthquake and a hurricane, Haiti once again appears to be a human basket case that seems to demand a sustained — and almost superhuman — effort there to put things right.
At the same time, however, there are reports that in addition to its own legendary corruption**, bands of tribute-seeking outlaws are blocking the delivery of aid to the most devastated regions of Haiti, thus compounding the misery of its people.
**Matched, in this case, by the corruption of the Clinton Foundation that was supposed to have “helped” in the reconstruction of Haiti after the last natural disaster.
How, exactly, are “decent, caring people” supposed to cope with this?
In a world where caring at all seems to be a fool’s errand — and the very values that compel us to care are subject to ridicule and disdain by people who claim to be our moral superiors — what should we wish to do in places like Afghanistan and in Haiti?
Again, Guy, what can we — should we — do? At this point, I am open to any rational proposal that might actually help. NGOs are certainly going to be a part of any solution, but given their own limitations — cf Anand Giridhardas’ analysis in his recent book, Winners Take All — there are problems with this approach as well. Hold on to our values, take the long view, vote with discernment, and …
Milt
The problem with leaving Afghanistan by land it’s that it’s semi surrounded by theocracies itself Iran and Pakistan are only slightly more tempting than Afghanistan itself.I don’t know enough about the former Soviet Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to say what sanctuary that they might offer.China is obviously a none starter.Some maps show an Indian/Afghan border but it’s actually the disputed Pakistan controlled part of Kashmir so you’d fall into the rather intolerant hands of the cricket playing theocract who runs Pakistan if you ended up there although the Indian leader,Modi,is not exactly likely to welcome an influx of Afghans .He wasn’t exactly keen on taking any of the Rohingi’s who fled Burma and most ended up in Bangladesh yet it was said by the Burmese government that they were Bengalis and India and Bangladesh share Bengal as was.One ethnic group split by Lord Mountbatten.
Biden chose to leave Afghanistan so his buddies in China can have a land route to the Mediterranean. Democrat voters now have blood on their hands from the 13 American soldiers and countless Afghans killed since Biden’s surrender.
I think it is likely that Biden and his administration had to weigh the risks of an extended time period for withdrawal versus evacuating more people by air. As we have seen ISIS has absolutely no compunction against killing innocent people including children. It is quite possible that the US military has received information that ISIS would try to shoot down a plane loaded with hundreds of military or civilians as it was taking off. There is a saying: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
In this situation the US military has to have the Taliban guarding their rear as the very last of its planes flies out of Kabul. Obviously not the ideal situation but perhaps the least bad among the other even worse options.