Joe Biden ends The Afghanistan War then starts it all over again
As for the Afghanistan War being over, President Biden appears to be starting it before he’s ended it.
As we make our exit after 20 years of the US War on Terror in Afghanistan, the terrorism we were fighting surges once again. Not that terrorism had ever stopped over the past 20 years, as over the past two years alone there were over 3500 terrorist attacks killing more than 15,000 Afghan civilians. If that is surprising, it’s that we rarely if ever would hear coverage of these attacks on CNN, MSNBC, NPR or pretty much in any of the corporate media. So the terrorist attack on the Kabul airport is just another day for the people of Afghanistan, the rerun of American military and intelligence failures fulfilling the guarded expectations of Afghans and American soldiers alike.
After 20 years of cutting deals with warlords and a corrupt Afghan government that we installed, our military finds itself relying on the Taliban to protect us in our exit, only to see a resurgent ISIS-K, a terrorist organization that we supposedly neutered, inflicting terror upon the Taliban, the Afghan people and US forces.
After 20 years, we have seen as many Americans killed in Afghanistan as were killed in 9/11, and we have killed 20 times that number of civilians. When you consider that over 100,000 Afghan police and security forces have died during this period as well, our war has killed more Afghan civilians in 20 years than terrorism has killed in the previous 100. So we are killing more Americans and Afghans than terrorism would have killed without our invasion and generating more terror while we do it.
Joe Biden’s response is no surprise. It is as standard-issue as his archaic political expediency. He even used the same one-liner George W Bush used to start the so-called War on Terror — “We will hunt you down.” And sure enough we will. If we can’t use troops we will use drones, Biden proudly announcing that we have killed a suspected member of ISIS-K who helped plan the airport attack, playing right into the hands of ISIS-K. The myriad offshoots of these terrorist organizations that have arisen since our invasion of Iraq have an infinite supply of recruits precisely due to our primitive retaliatory “gang wars” approach to foreign policy. They understand the US is as strategic as a playground bully, and if they kill so much as a single American we will reward them not only with the violence that serves as their recruitment tool but with billions in weapons systems as well. Which we just did once again in Aghanistan as we did in Iraq, Syria and Libya, making the Taliban and their subsidiaries a ranking military on a global level with new US air attack fighters, blackhawk helicopters, military drones, mine-resistant vehicles, a fleet of thousands of armored humvees, and countless thousands of sniper and assault rifles. Leaving billions of dollars in weapons of war to terrorist organizations is apparently America’s preferred path to peace in The Middle East.
Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan and end the game of chicken with the Taliban was the right one, but it would have been the right one 19 years ago. Our presence engendered a fragile territorial standoff which, as we can see clearly now, could only be maintained by our occupation of the region. After two decades the steady state had been firmly established, with the Taliban laying low in the 50% of the region they controlled during the entire length of the occupation, waiting for the US to leave so they could swiftly take over the rest. From the text of The Afhghanistan Papers, which consisted or hundreds of interviews conducted by the Inspector General with those directly involved in The Afghanistan War, it was plain to see that it would not be long after the US military left that the cities would fall to the Taliban.
The Afghanistan Papers outline serious doubt among military brass that the Afghan fighters they were training would be able to fend off Taliban fighters, so instead of revealing the truth the military publicly inflated the number of trained members of Afghan Security Forces to 300,000 (which Biden is doing as well) and staffed CNN and MSNBC panels assuring Americans that we were “turning the corner” in Afghanistan. To cover for his administration’s pretending that somehow he was transferring power to the Afghan government and not the Taliban, Biden and a faction of Democratic Party media have apparently decided that the best postwar strategy is to blame the poorly trained, largely illiterate Afghani security forces who were left unsupported by their own corrupt government.
From the resounding condemnation and crocodile tears being shed by virtually every media outlet one would think that the US was on the verge if something great in Afghanistan. But we weren’t. If any of these multimillion dollar cable news pundits or servants of Comcast, Turner Broadcasting or Sinclair Broadcasting had paid the Afghanistan Papers any mind they would know beyond a doubt that we and thus the Afghan people were doomed from the start. The trove of documents prove that whenever we decided we were through with our nation building in the region, the Taliban would swoop down and take over the country. In fact, it proves once again that our presence served as a recruitment tool for the Taliban and other terrorist groups, leaving our military and intelligence agencies cutting deals with whoever they thought would stop whichever particular faction was most threatening at the time. Terrorists, rebels, warlords and corrupt Afghan government officials were all fair game for caches of US cash and weapons systems if they promised to help the US rid a particular locale of whichever group was perceived as more of a threat at that particular moment.
So why then does The New York Times headline scream “US Prepares Airlift as Cities Fall to Taliban with Stunning Speed?” Why is every story on NPR marked by breathless declarations of how nobody could predict not only the speed but the breadth of the Taliban’s resurgence? Why do pundits and anchors on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox obsess about the “chaos” of our exit but not about the choas that has been going on in Afghanistan for the last 20 years? Why is there no questioning as to the wisdom of Biden’s latest airstrikes and drone attacks?
America’s humiliation is more American hubris
People rush to get into Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Aug. 16. (Reuters)
Because what has just transpired in Afghanistan has proven all of these news outlets to be just as complicit in the justification for taxpayer funded mass murder and terror as the leaders and the military that they have been enabling for the past 20 years. Corporate media’s incessant fawning over a parade of military surrogates, former generals, intelligence “experts“ and Establishment politicians entrenched in American empire, absent any dissenting voices, presented our involvement in Afghanistan exclusively from the perspective of those who profit from perpetual war. The ideology of American Exceptionalism. that the US somehow is the judge, jury and executioner of the world, became the worldview adopted by neoliberal and conservative media outlets alike. The fact that our presence in Afghanistan triggered the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians which in turn generated a potent recruitment tool for the Taliban was conveniently ignored, and our indictment by the United Nations and The International Criminal Criminal Court for war crimes was summarily dismissed instead of pausing to reflect on the substance of their reports.
While Biden’s decision shows he understands the polling on leaving Afghanistan, but his execution of it proves a misunderstanding or denial of the situation on the ground worthy of George W Bush’s “mission accomplished.” Making the pie-in-the-sky promise that our exit from Afghanistan would look nothing like what happened in Viet Nam shows the incompetence of not only Biden but our intelligence agencies as well. There is no excuse for making such a flippant prediction to the American people and then creating a crisis with a haphazard exit strategy.
Pundits who were fawning over Biden’s merely competent handling of the pandemic and the nobility in his lack of Tweets can no longer pretend that this is a president capable of making strategic decisions in foreign policy. The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, MSNBC and so many others who assured of us Joe Biden’s “steady” hand and “stable” foreign policy (which was intended to contrast against Bernie Sanders’ unsteadiness and instability) all throughout the 2020 presidential campaign are once again exposed for the enablers of American hegemony that they are. And again, if Biden’s decision to leave was the right one, his inability to comprehend the fragility of the Afghanistan government and the capabilities of the Taliban serves as just the latest chapter in a long and storied history of clouded judgment.
The media elite and many progressive outlets (that would be WCPT AM ia Chicago) biased Americans towards electing Joe Biden and into thinking that the US occupation of Afghanistan was somehow a justifiable and even noble endeavor. Yet the voices of the Afghan people themselves, those who suffered the most for our waging war in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, were never allowed to air their grievances on Face the Nation, Meet the Press or Morning Joe. Corporate media did not want to broadcast what the Afghan people would have to say about the nobility of the US occupation or about Joe Biden’s “steady hand” and “vast experience” in foreign policy.
How Joe Biden Became a Steady Hand Amid So Much Chaos
In recent months, Mr. Biden’s restraint with words and his refusal to take the political bait laid by President Trump show a level of discipline as the 46th president faces a cascade of crises.
Not only did we commit war crimes in Afghanistan, we left those who survived the terror we inflicted upon them knowing full well that their security forces were ill-prepared to fend off the Taliban’s 200,000 fighters. Throngs of desperate Afghanis clinging to departing American aircraft will serve as the defining image of 20 years of US lies and incompetence. The “chaos” that Biden and Democrats are telling us is a natural consequence of war is not just the result of the Biden administration’s inexplicable lack of planning but of the terror our war on terror continues to inflict upon poor black and brown people around the world.
Biden was a cheerleader for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In typical neoliberal fashion he lied about his support for these wars, conflating his sound advice to Barack Obama in 2009 to pull back on his inexplicable “surge” with his vocal support and spreading of nationalistic propaganda for both of these shameful and criminal occupations of countries that posed no direct threat to the United States. While the corporate media is up in arms about the “chaos” and “humiliation” of our inglorious exit, they are largely quiet when politicians and generals once again warn of the potential resurgence of boogeyman terrorist groups, failing to note that prior to our invasion of Iraq under Saddam Hussein there was virtually no terrorism in that country. There is no pushback to the constant drumbeat of the Bush Doctrine — “fight ’em over there so you don’t have to fight ’em over here” — which translates to “it’s fine to slaughter poor black and brown people halfway across the globe rather than risk what is purely speculative harm to white people in America.” If we were to “hunt them down” when the attacks are against Afghan civilians, which we do not, we would then find ourselves droning members of our own military and terrorists side by side.
Our country’s blatant disregard for the lives of the Afghan people, the stream of confounding lies pouring from our military and intelligence agencies by our media, and the nationalist and racist ideologies that the war on terror reinforces came home to roost on January 6th. The web of deception and nativist fear they spun in order to lead us into war, stoking Islamaphobia while citing false intelligence, were merely amplified by Trump. Biden’s hushed emotional appeals and performative “hunt you down” toughness are just more of the same. His kneejerk promises of revenge, the freezing of assets and the obligatory bombings and drone assassinations that follow will satisfy corporate media and Establishment institutions, but will only spark an escalation in conflict and misery for the Afghan people.
By its nature, the War on Terror can never end because it fuels the very terrorism it is fighting against. All we need to do is look in the mirror and see where our country stands in its infant mortality rate, life expectancy, gun violence, poverty and wealth inequality among the industrialized nations to see the toll that the prospect of endless war has taken. Hunting them down and “making them pay” has resulted in a trail of four failed states and a nearly twentyfold increase in terrorism in the Middle East since 2001. It appears that today’s definition of war does not include bombing or droning, only the presence of boots on the ground. So never fear, we might have ended the battle, but as Biden’s latest death threats and drone killings prove, including more civilian casualties including children, we will never end the war.
