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Was Everything Biden Said About Ending the Afghanistan War a Lie?
Sonali Kolhatkar
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 really 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 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.”
(Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Courtesy: Independent Media Institute.)
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The 20 Year War: How the West Destroyed Afghanistan
Less than two weeks after the horrific terrorist attack on New York in 2001, over two thousand people packed out Friends Meeting House in London for a meeting under the slogan ‘Stop the war before it starts’. It was called in response to George Bush’s declaration of the ‘War on Terror’ and the impending invasion of Afghanistan, and it became the start of the Stop the War Coalition.
Nearly 20 years later, President Biden has announced that the US will finally be ending the war in Afghanistan. By 11 September 2021, the 2,500 or so US troops, 750 British troops, and other NATO forces are supposed to have been withdrawn from the country.
Anyone who attended that meeting, or the many marches across the world since, could have told Biden and his predecessors long before now that this was how the war would end – in defeat. It’s the latest milestone in a trend of US imperial decline, and one which characterises the overreach of the War on Terror.
The ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ Lie
The US war in Afghanistan was at its outset a revenge war. A small terrorist organisation in the Afghan mountains headed by the son of a Saudi billionaire with close ties to the US establishment had orchestrated a deadly attack on US soil. The US had to be seen to respond – what would its global military might be worth if it didn’t?
But that wasn’t the only motivation. The war fit in with the neoconservative Washington consensus on foreign policy – one of unilateral and pre-emptive military action to maintain US supremacy. The war on ‘terror’—a war against a method, rather than any tangible or specific enemy—gave licence to begin in Afghanistan and carry on wherever was needed for strategic interests, as we’ve since seen in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere.
In Britain, Tony Blair was keen to deepen the ‘special relationship’ with the US. He regularly invoked the memory of empire when he talked about foreign policy, but conceded, ‘we are not a superpower, but we can act as a pivotal partner,’ going on to say, ‘I believe we have found a modern foreign policy role for Britain.’ Blair saw the world order defined by free-market interests as a new empire – one led by the US, with Britain as its closest partner.
Part of his dogma was establishing this new imperialism as a liberal endeavour. In his 1999 Chicago speech, while NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, he talked about ‘the principles of international community’ and the ‘moral purpose of defending the values we cherish’ in the context of taking military action against other countries. This was the basis for so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’, and for ensuring long-term Western military presence in those countries.
With Afghanistan, it wasn’t just about stopping Al-Qaida and making the Taliban pay; it was supposedly about the human rights of the Afghan people. In his Labour Conference speech just a few days before the war began, Blair polemicised, ‘women are treated in a way almost too revolting to be credible. First driven out of university; girls not allowed to go to school; no legal rights; unable to go out of doors without a man. Those that disobey are stoned.’
Yet, shortly after the attack began, when asked by Time magazine why he didn’t criticise Saudi Arabia—where women were treated similarly—Blair responded, ‘Yes, but we’re in conflict with the Taliban regime. […] At the present time I don’t think it’s very helpful for us to tell the Saudis how they should live.’
Even today, neocon Republicans are lining up to oppose withdrawal from Afghanistan under the pretext of protecting women’s rights. What’s deliberately ignored is that the Taliban have already regained control of half the country. Outside Kabul, two thirds of girls still don’t have access to primary school education. The idea that keeping the country in a state of war and raining bombs down on them is the way to protect women’s lives or human rights is absurd – but that’s the idea that underpins humanitarian intervention.
The Consequences of War
The prolonged war has directly killed at least 70,000 civilians, 43 percent of whom have been women and children – and that’s not including deaths caused by disease, or loss of access to food, water, and infrastructure. At least 2,400 US troops have been killed, and a further 70,000 Afghan military and police allied with the US have been killed.
When President Obama came into office, he led a massive troop surge to Afghanistan, jumping from 30,000 US troops in 2008 to over 110,000 at its peak in 2011. Alongside this, Obama ramped up drone warfare and carried out a minimum of 13,000 strikes in Afghanistan. As part of his drone program, Obama secretly changed the rules of engagement and enabled the US military to consider any male that looked between 18-65 in a strike zone an enemy combatant, allowing them to drastically downplay civilian casualties.
When President Trump came into office, he again increased the number of troops, carried on the drone program, and in 2017 dropped the ‘Mother of All Bombs’ (the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal with a 1km blast radius) on Afghanistan. Civilians were evacuated before the bomb was dropped, so there were no reported casualties, but local residents have reported health conditions including respiratory illnesses, and babies being born with deformities, as well as the decimation of agriculture in the area.
Because of the constant violence, Afghanistan is one of the top refugee-producing countries in the world. There are an estimated 2.5 million internally displaced people, and a further 2.7 million refugees that have fled the country. During the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ going on since 2015, refugees from Afghanistan made the second biggest group of people after Syrians seeking safety in Europe. Despite all this, Theresa May fought in court in 2016 to have Kabul designated as safe to return refugees to, in the middle of the bloodiest month on record at the time – with hundreds deported since.
The consequences of the war were not limited to Afghanistan. Proving that the domestic cannot be separated from foreign policy, and further proving that humanitarianism had nothing to do with the war, the US and UK also passed draconian legislation and dangerous precedents curtailing human rights and civil liberties.
As part of the war effort, the US established Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of suspected terrorists were taken without trial or charge and subject to torture. The CIA created a vast network of Black Sites to which prisoners were illegally taken, often via secret rendition flights, and ‘interrogated’ and detained – with the collusion of all NATO countries, particularly Britain.
On the home front, both the US and UK created an expansive counterterrorism apparatus that gave unprecedented powers to the police and the state. In the UK, police and border officials were given the authority to stop people without ‘reasonable suspicion’ and to detain suspects for up to 14 days (the government attempted to raise it to 90 days, but were defeated in parliament).
The policies are inherently Islamophobic – Pakistani travellers are 50 times more likely to be stopped and 150 times more likely to be detained than a white traveller. In the first five years of the Prevent program, 90 percent of referrals were Muslim, and between 2016 and 2019, over 600 children under the age of six were referred. This institutional Islamophobia, a product of the War on Terror, has been the driving force of Islamophobia and racist hate crimes against Muslims.
It’s also staggering to consider the $2.2 trillion spent by the US and at least £37 billion by the UK for the war. A large part of this spending happened at the same time as both governments were justifying brutal cuts to public spending which in the UK has been linked to the deaths of 130,000 people. Incredibly, some of those arguing against the withdrawal see this colossal waste of money as an ‘investment’ which needs to be protected by… more war.
The Ongoing Threat of War
While US withdrawal from Afghanistan is undoubtedly a good thing, if 20 years late, it’s unfortunately not the end. There is the possibility of conflict between the Taliban and the Ghani government, and the US and other regional and international powers will likely continue to fund and arm the different sides in the country. There are also hundreds of special operations forces as well as private military contractors who are not part of the official tally of troops and may remain.
The US remains committed to the War on Terror, and specifically the war against ISIS – which has gained a foothold in Afghanistan thanks to the destabilisation caused by the US’s war. The drone program remains operational, and the US will likely continue some level of aerial operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Importantly, Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, has said that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is part of focusing US resources on China instead. As the US grapples with its declining empire and its military defeats in the Middle East, alongside the rising power of China, it is reorienting itself to a new front of war. Biden recently proposed a $750 billion budget for the Pentagon with plans for a huge increase in defence spending.
In the UK, we have Boris Johnson, who is boosting defence spending by another £16.5 billion, increasing Britain’s nuclear arsenal by 40 percent, and is keen to continue playing the role of the US’s junior partner by ramping up its attention to Russia while the US turns to China.
At that first Stop the War meeting 20 years ago, anti-war campaigners warned of the dangers of the impending war and where it would lead – to more war, more terrorism, and a racist backlash. As the war in Afghanistan comes to an end, the anti-war movement can recognise its efforts in making this possible, but also how necessary it still is in the face of the ongoing threat of war.
(Courtesy: Counterfire, a British socialist newsportal and organisation.)
