I frequently said (over the past TWENTY YEARS) that I would have been happy to eat crow if it turned out that the US-led alliance created a successful state out of Afghanistan that visibly improved living standards and human rights thereby rendering any insurgency unpopular and useless. However, I didn't believe that would happen because the USA's leadership are monstrous psychopaths and the leadership of their allies are mostly feckless cowards, airheads and/or monstrous psychopaths.
One reason that I would have been happy to have eaten that crow would have been because of the improvements in the lives of the people of Afghanistan. Sadly, all of us who opposed this from the start have been vindicated in our pessimism.
The internal struggle between pro-Soviet and pro-US American cliques among the Afghanistan ruling class turned into a geo-political Cold War struggle because of Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Pole who hated the Soviet Union that had carved up his ancestral homeland between itself and the genocidal Nazi Germany. Thus began over forty years of bloodshed and misery. Carter and subsequent Republicans armed the Afghan Mujaheddin (working with governments like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) thereby empowering the same Islamic fundamentalists who would become the great existential threat of the Great Bullshit War on Terror after the Soviet Union fell.
The Soviets had intervened to defend their client government in Afghanistan but had to pull out when the costs of the war began to cripple them. Their client government lasted a few more years on its own before succumbing to the continued pressure of US-financed and armed rebels. The pro-Soviet regime lasted longer on its own because unlike the US creation it was not full of insanely corrupt gangsters but men who actually believed in something.
The USA walked away from Afghanistan and left it to the rival warlords who had destroyed the government in Kabul. They then fought among themselves and the country descended into anarchy of violence and rape and pillaging. This chaos brought the Taliban to the fore. (I'm not going to go into much more detail from here on. Because blogging is a waste of time. I'm really just going to record my own thoughts for myself really. And anyone else with a passing interest in a different perspective.) The Taliban were VERY fundamentalist/extremist. But they were not corrupt. The people of Afghanistan saw them as much more preferable than the rapist thieving warlords and soon the Taliban controlled most of the country except some northern provinces were the remnants of the warlords were holed up.
The USA was attracted to the now stable Afghanistan, seeing it as place to invest in pipelines and mineral concessions. The problem became that the Taliban had a passing acquaintance with Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist group. Osama bin Laden had been a Saudi mujaheddin leader and was allowed to use Afghanistan (along with other countries including Pakistan) as a safe haven.
Then September 11th, 2001. Afghanistan had little or nothing to do with this attack. But Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan when it happened and the bush II regime, led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ignored the Taliban government's conditions for turning over bin Laden because they were determined to go to war regardless.
The dirt-poor Afghan/Taliban military crumbled and the war was soon over. But instead of allowing Taliban fighers to go back home the USA stupidly offered bounties for "terrorists" and their reinvigorated warlord allies were happy to settle scores with Taliban opponents and there came a free-for-all of accusations and the hunting down and killing or imprisoning (which inevitably meant torturing) of Afghan men, both Taliban and ordinary farmers.
This, together with the corruption and violence of the warlords, and the corruption and violence and incompetence of the puppet government installed by the USA would eventually produce a return to civil war by 2005. The Washington Post's "Afghanistan Papers" exposed that US government, military and media leaders all knew that Afghanistan was a non-stop disaster but consistently covered this up with happy stories of schools and an Afghan Army and National Police force that were going from strength to strength under NATO tutelage. It was all bullshit. And Canada's government, military and media did the exact same thing.
It was Trump who really got the ball rolling. He personally thought the "forever wars" were a stupid waste of time but didn't really do much to stop them (in fact he actively pursued the one going on in Syria out of some twisted desire to steal Syria's oil) due to the opposition from the "Deep State." When he decided that his popularity with his base was waning and the Deep State would oppose him no matter what, he initiated genuine plans for withdrawal with the Taliban. These plans were inherited by Joseph Biden who extended the USA's presence from Trump's May 2021 to September 2021.
Make no mistake about it: Trump doesn't give a shit about anyone other than himself. He made no plans to rescue Afghan collaborators with the US occupation. In fact, his racist shit-stain friend Stephen Miller stymied efforts to bring them to the USA due to their being brown-skinned people not from a European country.
(Canadian veterans also complain about official obstruction in their own efforts to rescue Afghan nationals who worked with them during Canada's participation.)
Within weeks of the removal of US troops from Afghanistan, the whole house of cards collapsed. It collapsed because the "government" was comprised of gangsters, thieves, murderers and rapists. The NATO occupation was brutal and disgusting and for many Afghans the Taliban was [again] seen as the lesser evil.
The problem remains that the same imperialist voices who initiated this shit-show; who cheered it on for twenty years of stupid lies; are still the voices that are being sought out by the corporate oligarch, pro-imperialist media. Assholes like William Kristol, Max Boot, and the whole stinking lot of them are allowed to give their opinions while the people who have been proven right continue to be marginalized.
The narrative is that this is a disaster for Afghanistan, especially with regards to women's rights. And it's sickeningly true. The Taliban are horrible on women's rights. But if Afghan human rights and happiness (of both men and women) had been at all important to Western leaders, they would have done more to ensure that the government that they subsidized was a good one that did things for the people of Afghanistan. They didn't care so they didn't. Instead they subjected them to thieving rapist gangster warlords and thieving rapist gangster police and burned their cash crops and bombed their houses and invaded their homes in night raids and droned them from the skies for twenty fucking goddamned years.
And, besides, the Military-Industrial-Complex made a lot of money from Afghanistan. Ninety percent of the $2.6 TRILLION that was spent in Afghansitan by the US government during those twenty years went to weapons and ninety percent of that money stayed in the United States. It was a taxpayer subsidy to weapons manufacturers and other assorted scum.
I said in another post how the corporate media attempts to justify its presenting of Global Heating "skeptics" as being their attempt to provide "balance" and to give the public awareness of "both sides" of the "debate" over reality. But their adherence to "balance" and "objectivity" goes right out the window when it comes to war and imperialism. The reason for this disconnect is obvious: The corporate media doesn't care about balance and free debate. Questioning global warming benefits the fossil fuels industry and other oligarchic beneficiaries of the status-quo. Therefore their voices get heard and voices calling for less consumption and less greenhouse gases don't benefit any wealthy groups (at least to the extent that fossil fuels interests would be harmed) and so they get muted. But voices for peace don't profit anyone of any standing and they get utterly excluded. And no matter how often drooling imbeciles like Will Kristol or Thomas Friedman are found with shit on their lips, they'll always get called back on to share their idiocy with the general public and the corporate media's advertisers.
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