The U.S.’ longest war in history—spanning four presidential terms, two Republican and two Democratic—finally ended on August 30^th, having accomplished none of its goals and leaving Afghanistan’s population of nearly 40 million people, if anything, worse off than when it began. The U.S. spent two trillion dollars on its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan over the last two decades, funded with taxpayer dollars. More than 164,000 Afghans, 2,448 U.S. troops, and 1,846 other NATO troops paid with their lives. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans and tens of thousands of NATO soldiers were maimed or wounded. 

Nevertheless, corporate media pundits parroted the official U.S. narrative that the end of its occupation in Afghanistan is “bringing an end to 20 years of progress toward freedom and equality,” without dwelling on its responsibility for the return of the Taliban—the same reactionary government that it toppled 20 years ago.

Most also still do not question the U.S.’ claim that its invasion of Afghanistan was motivated only by the “war on terror” in response to the Al-Qaeda attacks of 9-11. Claiming that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan because the country was “harboring terrorists” ignores the fact that the Afghan people had nothing to do with the attacks on 9-11. They only had the terrible misfortune of being ruled by the Taliban’s murderous and misogynist dictatorship.

The U.S. exit from Afghanistan has exposed the truth about its occupation, for those who care to see it. The U.S. never intended to bring democracy to Afghanistan.Like all imperialists, the U.S.’ geopolitical strategy has never been based on the needs of people—and certainly not those who live in the countries it invades and occupies.

 Afghanistan: A pawn in the imperial game

For much of Afghanistan’s history its location in Central Asia has made it a target for control by world powers.As such, the fate of the Afghan people has been intertwined with the ever-shifting balance of forces among competing powers—no more so than in the decades after the Second World War. Afghanistan became a pawn in the proxy wars fought between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War—as the world’s two rival superpowers battled for military supremacy.

In 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan and remained there until their defeat in 1989, although their puppet government survived until 1992.But then, as now, the end of the military occupation did not bring anything remotely resembling “peace.” While the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan left a political vacuum, the U.S. shares the responsibility for the ensuing civil war among the competing armies of Islamic fundamentalists who fought to control Afghanistan.

Even before the Soviet invasion, the CIA had begun arming and training Islamic fundamentalists to form the Mujahedeen fighting force and continued in this endeavor throughout the Soviet occupation. Among the fighters the CIA trained was Osama Bin Laden. Ronald Reagan called the Mujahedeen “freedom fighters” because they were an armed opposition force attempting to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, but they did so at the behest of U.S. imperialism.

But once the Soviet Union withdrew its troops in 1989, the U.S. no longer needed the Mujahedeen, so it turned its back on Afghanistan without regard to the consequences—including the civil war that tore Afghanistan apart between 1992 and 1995.

An unstable coalition government, calling itself the Islamic State of Afghanistan, came to power in 1992. The government was made up of seven separate Mujahedeen political parties, each representing the fiefdom of a corrupt warlord. The coalition of these warlords backing the Islamic State, known as National Islamic United Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan,unleashed a reign of terror upon the already war-torn population. The list of human rights atrocities committed by these warlords included civilian killings, indiscriminate aerial bombardment and shelling, direct attacks on civilians, summary executions, rape, persecution based on religion or ethnicity, the recruitment and use of children as soldiers, and the use of antipersonnel landmines.Women were routinely abducted, beaten, and raped, or sold into prostitution.

According to human rights expert Patricia Gossman, “Between 1992 and 1995 fighting among the factions of the alliance reduced a third of Kabul to rubble and killed more than 50,000 civilians. The top commanders ordered massacres of rival ethnic groups, and their troops engaged in mass rape.”

The Taliban, formed at the end of 1994, took power in 1995, winning the support of many Afghans because it promised to put an end to the widespread lawlessness and violence of the United Front warlords. As is well known, however, the Taliban substituted its own brand of barbarism for the chaos.

The 9-11 terrorist attacks provided the U.S. with an excuse to invade Afghanistan. By 2001, the United Front was renamed the “Northern Alliance” and portrayed by the U.S. as the “new” government in waiting—even though it was made up of the same corrupt warlords who terrorized the country during the civil war in the 1990s.

From the end of the Cold War to the “War on Terror”

 The year 1989 marked the fall of the Berlin Wall; by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved itself, bringing the Cold War to an end. Even before then, while the Soviet Union was unraveling in 1990, the U.S. began to reap the benefits of its new status as the world’s unrivaled superpower. Those were heady days for U.S. imperialism, dubbed a “unipolar moment” by its advocates.

In September 1990, President George H.W. Bush declared a “new world order.” Only months later, the U.S. invaded Iraq, scoring a rapid victory in February 1991 by using its overwhelming military might. In its final aerial bombardment on Iraq, it massacred tens of thousands of Iraqi troops who were trying to retreat—a clear violation of international law—which one military officer described as “a turkey shoot” and observers called the “highway of death.”

After that carnage, Bush warned the rest of the world “What we say goes!”By March, Bush declared, “[B]y God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Bush was referring to what was the main purpose of its new wars: to overcome its colossal defeat in the Vietnam war in 1975 at the hands of the North Vietnamese national liberation movement and to reestablish U.S. imperialism as a military force to be reckoned with.

By the time Bush’s son, George W. Bush, was elected president in 2000, neoliberal Democratic President Bill Clinton had already primed the pump for new and bigger U.S. military interventions—having bombed Iraq’s “no fly zone” regularly for a period of eight years, killing many hundreds of Iraqi civilians, and imposing economic sanctions that killed well over a million Iraqis, including a half million children in the years after the U.S. victory in the first Iraq War.

In August 1998, the Clinton administration also ordered the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and a farm in Afghanistan that it claimed was being used by Osama Bin Laden as a training site, paving the way for further military strikes against such targets.

As early as January 1998, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—founded by Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, and other leading neocons—demanded that President Clinton undertake the “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime.” By the end of October 1998, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, making regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy.

Mother Jones reported that on January 20, 2001 “Saddam’s removal is top item of [George W.] Bush’s inaugural national security meeting. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill later recalls, ‘It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying, Go find me a way to do this.’”

Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitzhad already called on the U.S. to strike Baghdad as soon as “we find the right way to do it.”Afterward, he stated,“I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators… [T]he notion [that we need] hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark.”

Bush Jr. and his band of neoconservatives launched the War on Terror at the first opportunity, which was provided by the attacks on 9-11. But the war on Afghanistan served as a steppingstone for invading Iraq in 2003.

The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan ultimately backfired, culminating in its hasty departure in the last two weeks of August. The comparison between U.S. imperialism’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and that of the Vietnam War is obvious, along with its diminished ability to invade other countries at will. If the U.S.’ stated objective 20 years ago was to dominate the world, it failed miserably. China and Russia, alongside regional powers,are already circling the carcass of the U.S.’disastrous occupation.

 The U.S. built a government of corruption, not democracy

The U.S. installed Hamid Karzai as the first “interim” president beginning in 2001 and he remained so until 2014. When Karzai increasingly expressed differences of opinion, the U.S. worked to replace him beginning in 2009. The U.S.-educated and World Bank-trained Ashraf Ghani was elected as the second (and final) president in 2014. But Ghani was openly critical of wasted international aid in Afghanistan, and the Trump administration completely bypassed his government when it negotiated with the Taliban in February 2020—although Ghani was expected to carry out the U.S. withdrawal with by May 2021. Is it any wonder why the Afghan government was not motivated to stand up for U.S. imperialism?

The U.S. also underfunded the Afghan military, so that soldiers earned less than they would have fighting for the Taliban. The U.S.-led Afghan government did not offer death benefits for the families of soldiers who were killed in action. As NPR reported, unscrupulous Afghan generals frequently lined their own pockets with money intended for soldiers’ pay; by selling firewood meant to keep their troops warm; or by ordering low quality rice for soldiers’ meals and keeping the rest of the money. As the Taliban advanced in recent months, it paid Afghan troops if they refused to fight, and officers received the largest amounts. The U.S. overseers never gave the Afghan military a stake in their imperial project.

Over the last two decades, the U.S. shaped and maintained the thoroughly corrupt political and economic system in Afghanistan, which benefited a tiny elite and left the vast majority of the population living in poverty. By the time U.S. troops withdrew, the poverty rate in Afghanistan was 55 percent–no different than in October 2001 when the U.S. invaded. The U.S. occupation also oversaw the resurrection of the drug trade, which the Taliban had previously shut down, despite its many other crimes against the Afghan population.

As Jawied Nawabi argued in Truthout,

[T]he way the U.S. and NATO structured the country’s development aid system seems to have nurtured the immense corruption of warlords and strengthened the Taliban by indirectly funding them through transportation and building contracts. Furthermore, the U.S. and Britain’s “war on drugs” also fueled this corruption: The country has produced around 90 percent of the worlds’ opium supply since the beginning of the U.S. occupation, from which the Taliban received around 50-60 percent of their funding.

Added to this was U.S.’s brutal counterinsurgency policies of bombing villages and its night raids in rural areas with nonexistent infrastructure, which further alienated a rural Afghan population already experiencing high unemployment and underdevelopment due to decades of war.

It is no surprise that the Taliban recruited heavily from agricultural areas, which received zero financial support from U.S. and international aid agencies. Afghanistan, where the vast majority of the population lives in rural areas, has suffered a 40 percent unemployment rate as a result, with 70 percent of its population under the age of 30. Under these circumstances, the option of cultivating poppy certainly would have been a more lucrative option for farmers.

Moreover, U.S. reconstruction aid required Afghans on the receiving end to buy most of their goods and services from American contractors, further enriching U.S. corporations. Nawabi estimated that fully 90 percent of U.S. aid ended up in the hands of U.S. businesses, while only two percent went to infrastructure and anti-poverty programs, thereby instituting the rampant corruption that characterized the Afghan government throughout the U.S. occupation.

The CIA directly fueled the corruption by delivering suitcases (and sometimes plastic bags) full of cash totaling tens of millions of dollars to the Afghan government to buy its support and to pay off the warlords who fought on its behalf around the country. “We called it ‘ghost money,” Khalil Roman, Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told The New York Times in 2013. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.” An anonymous U.S. official admitted to the Times, “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States.”

Blaming the victims

Although President Joe Biden congratulated himself on the “extraordinary success” of the Western evacuation efforts during the last two weeks of August, the U.S.’ military withdrawal was an ongoing scene of chaos, incompetence, and brutality toward Afghan people desperate to escape the return of the Taliban.

The Biden administration was taken by complete surprise when the Afghan president fled the country and the Afghan military refused to fight, leading to the rapid Taliban takeover on August 15^th. For this reason, the evacuation plan was thrown together at the last minute as the U.S. and its Western allies frantically sought to remove their citizens and Afghan collaborators—succeeding in evacuating just over 120,000, but also abandoning many more thousands of translators, drivers, women’s rights activists, and other Afghans most at risk for Taliban retaliation.

Imperial arrogance apparently knows no bounds.On July 8^th, Biden scoffed at the possibility that the Taliban could quickly return to power as “highly unlikely,” while praising the superiority of the Afghan military. Just 11 days before the Taliban marched into Kabul, the Pentagon’s top general Mark Milley predicted that the Taliban would not be able to take over the government for “weeks to months, and even years, following our departure.”

Despite the obvious failures of the out-of-touch occupiers, President Biden made it seem that the two decade war failed because Afghanistan is incapable of governing itself, in a classic colonial exercise of blaming the victims: “The events we are seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure Afghanistan,” Biden stated bitterly. He added, “U.S. troops should not fight a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for their future.”

It is worth noting that CIA managed to get out most of its thousands of operatives and their families before the end of the evacuation, even though the State Department revealed that the majority of Afghans who worked for the U.S. over the last two decades didn’t make it out of the country.

The Afghan refugee crisis today

Afghanistan has been in a refugee crisis already for decades—with millions of Afghan migrants, most of them living in neighboring countries or displaced within Afghanistan’s borders.

Now there is a new wave of Afghan refugees trying to flee from the returning Taliban. So far, the Biden administration has committed to allowing only 50,000 Afghan refugees to resettle in the U.S.—which seems like a very small number from a after a two-decade occupation.

Yet former president Donald Trump—whose administration negotiated the troop withdrawal eventually carried out by Biden—accused Biden of bringing “thousands of terrorists” to “neighborhoods around the world.”Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, echoed Trump’s view, declaring that he would not accept any Afghan refugees because militants could slip into the country.

Most wealthy countries have not been much more welcoming to Afghan refugees. Australia agreed to accept a mere 3,000 Afghans, but Karen Andrews, Australia’s minister for home affairs also warned, “Australia’s strong border protection policies have not and will not change.” She added, “No one who arrives in Australia illegally by boat will ever settle here. Do not attempt an illegal boat journey to Australia. You have zero chance of success.”

French president Emanuel Macron declared that Europe should “protect itself” from a large number of Afghan refugees.The Swiss government announced it would not accept large numbers of migrants, while Austria announced that it would take none.

The British government agreed to take 5,000 refugees this year and 20,000 over the next few years. However, as the UK prepared to end all evacuations, it agreed to allow the British military to escort 200 cats and dogs out of Afghanistan from a charity run by a British national—while leaving the entire staff of 1,000 people behind.

Going out with a bang

The last U.S. military plane flew out of Kabul on August 30^th, leaving Afghanistan’s traumatized population to deal with the wreckage of its two decades of failed war and occupation. But the U.S. managed to continue inflicting damage right up to the very end.

The final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan on August 29^th—credited with preventing another ISIS-K attack—also killed an extended family of ten in Kabul, four adults and six children: Malika, age two; Sumaya, age two; Binyamen, age three; Armin, age four; Farzah, age nine; Faisal, age ten. None of the adults was over the age of 40. This provided yet another reminder of all the Afghan civilians who U.S. bombs have destroyed over the last 20 years, dismissed by the military as “collateral damage.”

The U.S. evacuation did not only leave many thousands of Afghans behind. It also put a target on their backs. After the Taliban set up checkpoints preventing many desperate civilians from reaching the airport, the U.S. provided the Taliban with lists of people it had approved for evacuation. Politico reported, “U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.” When queried, Biden claimed he did not know about such lists, but that it might have happened. “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” an anonymous Defense Department official told Politico.

The U.S. occupation may be over, but its consequences will be felt by the people of Afghanistan for many years to come.The two suicide bombs that exploded outside Kabul’s airport on August 26^th, killing 13 U.S. soldiers and 170 Afghan civilians, offered a glimpse of the violence and instability that lies in Afghanistan’s future. ISIS-K, a regional affiliate of the Islamic State and enemy of the Taliban, claimed responsibility. Tragically, peace—in any sense of the word—is not on the horizon for the Afghan people.