Afghanistan is often described as the graveyard of empires. However in America’s case, it also dug its own tomb. Joe Biden, the 4th U.S. President to oversee the American war in Afghanistan, announced this week completion of that operation. He claimed with an impossibly straight face, “the United States did what we came to do … get the terrorists who assaulted us on 9/11”. Now, it’s time to bring the troops home.
In other words, according to President Biden, after waging a war for 20 years in Central Asia, it is time to hail “objective achieved”.
Contrary to previous presidential versions, he stated the U.S. did not pertain to “country construct” which from now on “it’s up to the Afghans to make decisions about the future of their country.” That practically seems like the Americans freed the Afghan nation to select its fate– instead of the appalling reality that the nation is being deserted for the huge mess that it has become under Washington’s tutelage.
The truth is the United States is scurrying out of Afghanistan like a rat from a sinking ship. Twenty years of war costing trillions of dollars and countless casualties have ruined a nation. Another nation in a long list of others damaged by another criminal American war.
In contrast to Biden’s fantasy world, the majority of the U.S. troops privately left Afghanistan last week from the sprawling Bagram airbase north of the capital Kabul. The Americans left in the dark of night without even notifying the Afghan army which it supports against the insurgent Taliban militants. The Taliban are now poised to over-run the whole nation and oust the Washington-backed puppet administration in Kabul. When the Americans invaded Afghanistan twenty years earlier, the Taliban rulers were routed. They are set to go back to power, although President Biden this week defied reality by declaring that the U.S.-backed Kabul routine would not fall. He declared that U.S. “assistance for Afghanistan would withstand”, his words dripping with nauseating cynicism.
Washington’s war in Afghanistan is called “America’s longest war”. It lasted two times as long as the Vietnam War. The shambolic rash exit from Afghanistan evokes memories of the Fall of Saigon in 1975 when residual American troops and CIA agents climbed onto helicopters in a final retreat prior to the Vietnamese communist victory of freedom.
Nevertheless, Washington’s military entanglement in Afghanistan really returns 40 years when it started clandestine arming of tribal militia– the Mujahideen– in 1979 for a revolt against a communist federal government allied with the Soviet Union. It was a deliberate ploy by the Americans to set a trap for Moscow and to provide it “their Vietnam” in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the nationwide security advisor to President Carter. The Soviets stepped in to support the Kabul government at the end of 1979 and a withering proxy war occurred for 10 years. The arming of the Mujahideen was implied to “bleed the Soviets as much and for as long as possible”, Brzezinski would later boast. It is notable how Western media describe the “Soviet invasion” of Afghanistan while the American military, we are informed, went to the nation to “liberate it from terrorism”.
Arguably, the Americans succeeded in their Machiavellian plot. The proxy war was a consider the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, two years after the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in an orderly fashion, unlike the abrupt American evacuation. The Soviet-backed federal government in Kabul eventually fell in 1992 paving the way for the rise of the Taliban out of the Mujahideen. It is worth thinking about how Afghanistan may have established otherwise if the Americans had not prompted the proxy war against the Soviet Union.
What the Americans developed in Afghanistan was a cauldron of Islamist extremism, assisted and abetted by British and Pakistani intelligence in addition to enormous Saudi financing. The spin-offs of Mujahideen, Taliban, Al Qaeda and Islamic State, to name a few, can all be traced to the root of American Cold War machinations in Afghanistan. The effects of terrorism have actually been ravaging for the world. The American Physician Frankenstein has actually utilized these fear proxy armies for program modification throughout the Middle East and North Africa while also avowedly waging a worldwide war versus the very same terrorists. The “war on fear” came out of the Americans cultivating and equipping jihadists in Afghanistan for their geopolitical chess game against the Soviet Union.
President Biden’s claim of “mission achieved” is an unreasonable distortion of truth. No doubt too, Hollywood is working on the more whitewashing of history with impressive tales of American virtue and nerve.
Afghanistan is devitalized and more unstable than ever, a breeding place for extremism that threatens the security of Central Asia, including that of Russia and China.
In a twisted ominous method, the local instability bequeathed by the Americans to Russia and China may offer the organizers in Washington some complete satisfaction. Forty years of concealed and obvious war was an advantage for the intelligence-military-industrial complex. Now having actually chosen to give up the video game, the American organizers can take grim consolation that the wreckage in Central Asia will henceforth haunt geopolitical rivals in Moscow and Beijing.
America’s longest war came with a horrendous cost to Afghans and ordinary Americans. The financial cost has been ruinous for both countries. Just about every intrigue that Washington has actually caused has rebounded in self-defeating damage. The quagmire meant for the Soviet Union wound up being an even larger quagmire for the Americans. Biden’s pretense of success is an outrageous lie covering decades of criminality.
Afghanistan is often referred to as the graveyard of empires. The British colonialists stopped working as did the Soviets. But in America’s case, it likewise dug its own tomb.
The views of private contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.