The return of the Taliban to power will be one more signpost of completion of the American empire– and nobody will be held accountable.
By Chris HEDGES
The fiasco in Afghanistan, which will unwind into chaos with warp speed over the next couple of weeks and make sure the return of the Taliban to power, is another signpost of completion of the American empire. The 2 decades of combat, the one trillion dollars we spent, the 100,000 soldiers released to suppress Afghanistan, the modern gizmos, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, Reaper drones equipped with Hellfire rockets and GBU-30 bombs and the International Hawk drones with high-resolution cameras, Special Operations Command composed of elite rangers, SEALs and air task forces, black sites, abuse, electronic security, satellites, attack airplane, mercenary armies, infusions of countless dollars to buy off and bribe the regional elites and train an Afghan army of 350,000 that has never displayed the will to combat, failed to beat a guerrilla army of 60,000 that moneyed itself through opium production and extortion in one of the poorest nations on earth.
Like any empire in terminal decay, nobody will be held responsible for the fiasco or for the other fiascos in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the political leaders. Not the CIA and intelligence firms. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in journalism who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and location specialists. Not the defense market. Empires at the end are cumulative suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter the number of fiascos, oversights and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or just how much cash it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing organizations and the physical infrastructure decayed.
The human catastrophe– a minimum of 801,000individuals have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan and 37 million have been displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria according to The Watson Institute at Brown University– is minimized to a neglected footnote.
Almost all the approximately 70 empires throughout the last 4 thousand years, consisting of the Greek, Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, royal German, imperial Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires, collapsed in the same orgy of military recklessness. The Roman Republic, at its height, just lasted 2 centuries. We are set to break down in approximately the very same time. This is why, at the start of World War I in Germany, Karl Liebknecht called the German military, which locked up and later assassinated him, “the enemy from within.”
Mark Twain, who was a strong challenger of the efforts to plant the seeds of empire in Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, composed a thought of history of America in the twentieth-century where its “lust for conquest” had actually ruined “the Great Republic … [due to the fact that] squashing upon the powerless abroad had taught her, by a natural procedure, to withstand with passiveness the like at home; wide varieties who had actually praised the squashing of other individuals’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake.”
Twain knew that foreign occupations, designed to enhance the ruling elites, utilize occupied populations as lab rats to ideal techniques of control that soon migrate back to the homeland. It was the harsh colonial policing practices in the Philippines, that included a huge spy network in addition to routine whippings, torture, and executions, which ended up being the model for centralized domestic policing and intelligence gathering in the United States. Israeli’s arms, monitoring and drone markets evaluate their products on the Palestinians.
It is one of the dark paradoxes that it was the American empire, led by Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, which spawned the mess in Afghanistan. Brzezinski managed a multibillion-dollar CIA covert operation to arm, train and gear up the Taliban to combat the Soviets. This clandestine effort sidelined the secular, democratic opposition and ensured the ascendancy of the Taliban in Afghanistan, along with the spread of its extreme Islam into Soviet Central Asia, as soon as Soviet forces withdrew. The American empire would, years later on, find itself frantically trying to ruin its own creation. In April 2017, in a traditional example of this sort of ridiculous blowback, the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs”– the most powerful standard bombin the American toolbox– on an Islamic State cave complex in Afghanistan that the CIA had actually invested millions in structure and strengthening.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were not an existential risk to the United States. They were not politically considerable. They did not interrupt the balance of worldwide power. They were not an act of war. They were acts of nihilistic horror.
The only method to combat terrorists is to isolate them within their own societies. I was in the Middle East for The New York Times after the attacks. The majority of the Muslim world was horrified and revolted at the crimes against humankind that had been performed in the name of Islam. If we had the courage to be susceptible, to understand that this was an intelligence war, not a standard war, we would be far much safer and protected today. These wars in the shadows, as the Israelis highlighted when they tracked down the assassins of their professional athletes in the 1972 Olympic video games in Munich, take months, even years of work.
But the attacks offered the ruling elites, lusting for control of the Middle East, specifically Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks, the reason to carry out the best strategic oversight in American history– the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war, consisting of then Senator Joe Biden, knew little about the nations being invaded, did not comprehend the limits of commercial and technocratic war or the inescapable blowback that would see the United States reviled throughout the Muslim world. They believed they could implant customer regimes by force throughout the area, use the oil incomes in Iraq, given that the war in Afghanistan would be over in a matter of weeks, to cover the expense of reconstruction and amazingly restore American global hegemony. It did the opposite.
Invading Iraq and Afghanistan, dropping iron fragmentation bombs on villages and towns, kidnapping, abusing and locking up tens of thousands of people, using drones to sow terror from the skies, reanimated the discredited radical jihadists and was a powerful recruiting tool in the fight against U.S. and NATO forces. We were the very best thing that ever happened to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
There was little objection within the class structure to these intrusions. The congressional vote was 518 to one in favor of empowering President George W. Bush to launch a war, Rep. Barbara Lee being the only dissenter. Those of us who spoke up against the idiocy of the looming bloodlust were slandered, denied media platforms, and cast into the wilderness, where the majority of us remain. Those who offered us the war kept their loudspeakers, a reward for their service to empire and the military-industrial complex. It did not matter how cynical or foolish they were.
Historians call the self-defeating military adventurism of late empires “micro-militarism.” During the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) the Athenians got into Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and countless soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain attacked Egypt in 1956 in a disagreement over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and was humiliated when it had to withdraw its forces, bolstering the status of Arab nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
“While increasing empires are often cautious, even rational in their application of military for conquest and control of overseas rules, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered display screens of power, dreaming of vibrant military masterstrokes that would in some way recover lost prestige and power,” the historian Alfred McCoy writes “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decrease of United States Global Power.” “Often unreasonable even from a royal perspective, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenses or humiliating beats that just accelerate the procedure already under method.”
The death blow to the American empire will, as McCoy writes, be the loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This loss will plunge the United States into a crippling, and extended anxiety. It will require an enormous contraction of the international military footprint.
The unsightly, squalid face of empire, with the loss of the dollar as the reserve currency, will become familiar in the house. The bleak financial landscape, with its decay and hopelessness, will speed up an array of violent and self-destructive pathologies consisting of mass shootings, hate crimes, opioid and heroin overdoses, morbid obesity, suicides, betting, and alcohol addiction. The state will progressively do without the fiction of the rule of law to rely exclusively on militarized authorities, basically internal armies of occupation, and the prisons and jails, which already hold 25 percent of the world’s detainees although the United States represents less than 5 percent of global population.
Our demise will most likely come more promptly than we imagine. When profits diminish or collapse, McCoy mentions, empires become “breakable.” An economy greatly dependent on enormous federal government subsidies to produce primarily weapons and munitions, in addition to fund military adventurism, will go into a tailspin with a greatly depreciated dollar, being up to possibly a 3rd of its previous value. Prices will considerably increase due to the fact that of the high increase in the expense of imports. Salaries in genuine terms will decline. The decline of Treasury bonds will make paying for our enormous deficits burdensome, perhaps impossible. The joblessness level will reach depression period levels. Social assistance programs, because of a contracting budget plan, will be sharply reduced or removed. This dystopian world will sustain popular and active nationalism that put Donald Trump in the White Home. It will generate an authoritarian state to keep order and, I expect, a Christianized fascism.
The tools of control on the outer reaches of empire, currently part of our presence, will end up being common. The wholesale monitoring, the abolition of fundamental civil liberties, militarized police authorized to use indiscriminate deadly force, making use of drones and satellites to keep us monitored and afraid, together with the censorship of the press and social networks, familiar to Iraqis or Afghans, will specify America. We are not the very first empire to suffer this fate. It is a familiar ending. Imperialism and militarism are toxins that eradicate the separation of powers, created to prevent tyranny, and snuff out democracy. If those who orchestrated these criminal activities are not held responsible, and this suggests organizing continual mass resistance, we will pay the rate, and we may pay it quickly, for their hubris and greed.