US Imperialism and Afghanistan
US Imperialism and Afghanistan
ben sayler
August 16 2021
The Flag of Afghanistan
After 20 years US troops are now leaving Afghanistan.
As people on both the right and left predicted, the Taliban is now moving swiftly to seize control of the country and impose its particular brand of authoritarian violence.
I’m not an expert on Afghanistan. I’ve never been there, I don’t personally know anyone from there, and I haven’t read books written about, or by, people from there. This is also true for 99% of Westerners claiming to have any special knowledge, insight, or expertise on Afghanistan, especially those with ties to the military. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name a single Westerner who has any business talking about what the people of Afghanistan should do or what should happen next now that US troops are leaving the region.
This is the first, of many, issues facing any well-intentioned person wanting to show support or gain an understanding of what’s happening: The Western media asserting a completely unearned and self-serving confidence about what people in other countries should do or about what our governments should do in regards to people in other countries. If you are sincere about wanting to understand what’s happened, and what’s happening, in Afghanistan there are many ways to do that, and none of them involve listening to Western media pundits pontificating on the lives of people they’ve never met in a region they’ve never been to speaking a language they don’t understand.
Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, we in the US have been beset by a constant barrage from the left and right of perspectives on Afghanistan that do not center or prioritize the people of Afghanistan. On the right we are inundated by military propaganda focused on “winning” the “war” and “defeating” “terrorism”. On the left, we are presented with statistics about US troop deaths and exhaustive budgetary breakdowns all couched in narratives about the pointlessness of “war” and the need to focus on taking care of our home before worrying about others.
Both perspectives are emphatically uninterested in the well being of the people of Afghanistan, instead taking on various degrees of nationalistic fervor centered around those who volunteer to kill on behalf of American interests alternately defending or condemning the “war” but never for reasons other than how it affects the United States. But there has been no “war” in Afghanistan. And there are no innocent US troops or Americans affected by the last 20 years of US violence in Afghanistan. There has only been an imperialist and colonial plundering and massacre of a country waged by volunteer soldiers for the sole purpose of enriching merchants of death and drug lords.
In October of 2001, Afghanistan’s deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir offered to hand over Bin Laden to a third country if the United States would cease bombing and could provide evidence that Bin Laden was being the September 11th attacks. Bush turned him down. There was never, not even for a day, any pretense that this invasion and assault on Afghanistan was about the September 11th attacks. It was from the very start about empire and using the jingoism sweeping the US in the wake of 9/11 as an excuse to pursue crimes against humanity in service of empire.
During this time, almost 70,000 Afghan soldiers have been killed trying to stabilize their home in the wake of US-led chaos and upheaval. Yet this, too, is mocked and belittled by the “left” wing of the US government as the focus remains on the interests of empire and the narrative of American victimhood in the face of its own atrocities. The Afghan military has fought and died at a rate thirty times greater than the United States to fight in a conflict begun and escalated by the United States. The Taliban, after all, is merely another tentacle of empire, a vassal force of tyranny built up by the US over the last almost 40 years when it suited US interests and poised to benefit from a departure that will leave behind plenty of arms and resources for the Taliban to use in securing its hold over Afghanistan.
So morally bankrupt and structurally corrupt is US foreign policy that even in spite of all this, our withdrawal of troops from the region is the only good option left. While it is theoretically possible for the US to provide aid and support to Afghanistan, to remain present and help the people of Afghanistan build their nation as they see fit, no such thing has ever or would ever happen with the US government operating as it does. The anti-imperial slogan of “No US intervention” is not a rebuke against the concept of international solidarity, but a rebuke against the pattern of US foreign policy which is unfailingly self-interested and destructive to all subjected to it. In this context, then, the only thing to be done is to remove all US presence from Afghanistan and in doing so Biden has done what all presidents over the last 20 years should have.
Yet it would be naive to celebrate this necessary act or to claim it as the end of the colonization of Afghanistan. The Taliban, after all, are a violent, oppressive, and cruel organization that will, and are, committing atrocities across the country, a lateral shift from the violence overseen by US imperialism but scarcely much of an improvement. And to those who would claim such violence is progress as it at least is no longer the result of imperialism over which the people of Afghanistan have little control or agency, let us remember that the Taliban only has the power it was built up by the US to serve US interests. The Taliban is, in other words, merely a different homegrown form of US colonialism. Our departure, while necessary, is hardly an end to colonization or imperialism in the region, it’s merely an end to our explicit and overt tyranny.
Worst of all, none of this is a failure. This is exactly what was intended all along. While war hawks and military industrialists may have wanted US troops to remain longer, the collapse of Afghan governance and destitution wrought across the region was from the very beginning the entire point of invading. The invasion of Afghanistan was always for about such unscrupulous and opportunistic reasons as giving the US and its corporate companions access to the ample opium and oil resources as well as funnel money from the US government to arms manufacturers and contractors looking for their next big break. The death and destruction and trauma and loss suffered by the people of Afghanistan is irrelevant to US interests - as far as the architects of this violence are concerned, the objectives were achieved.
So it is then that over the last 20 years over 240,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the US invasion. Plenty of arm chair policy experts and pedants would argue that some portion of that number would have been killed anyway due to domestic violence, but of course that is how all defenders of imperialism and the ghoulish Pax Americana operate: the world is full of violent brown people and whatever violence the US inflicts it is always with the utmost intent of doing good. It is this framework by which so many mourn the paltry number of dead US troops, as though the great tragedy of 240,000 people killed in their homes and countless others displaced and traumatized and permanently scarred is the small number who died inflicting such tragedy.
I am not an expert on Afghanistan. I do not know the region well. I don’t know the people or their history except through glimpses and anecdotes and stories. I don’t know the geography nor the climate beyond assumptions made from selective video footage. I’ve read English language texts written by non-Afghan people about Afghanistan, but even then not enough to justly claim any sort of special knowledge.
But then, this is not about expertise, it’s about solidarity and morality.
I don’t need to have the credentials that so many self-proclaimed experts have to know that the US invasion of Afghanistan was wrong, that the Taliban seizing power is wrong, and that it is the people of Afghanistan who suffer these wrongs. That is not the US federal debt that has suffered nor the US military, that it is not Americans after 9/11 who are the victims of this violence, but that is the people of Afghanistan who for 20 years have endured an indefensible colonial and imperial violence and who are now left isolated to defend themselves against the echoes and tentacles of the empire that has terrorized them for 20 years, all while those who sponsored and wrought such terror ponder amongst themselves over who lost more, the US treasury or the US troops who professionally terrorize people the world over?