In Afghanistan, a legacy of U.S. failure endures - By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall (WP)

A guerras imperiais que redundam apenas em mortes, destruição, fracasso e vergonha.

O Afeganistão já derrotou vários projetos imperiais, o da União Soviética, 30 anos atrás, e o dos EUA, um ano atrás, e o balanço está abaixo.

O Talibã vai seguir oprimindo as mulheres e a população civil de maneira geral, em nome de um fundamentalismo regressista.

Pobre do Afeganistão, mas acredito que nenhum outro império, menos ainda o da China, vai se intrometer nos seus assuntos internos. O país afundará na miséria e na criminalidade, até onde a vista alcança...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

In Afghanistan, a legacy of U.S. failure endures   By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall  The Washington Post, August 15, 2022 Taliban fighters stand guard after a gathering at the former presidential palace in Kabul on Aug. 13. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images) A year ago, the Taliban captured Kabul, capping the dramatic fall of Afghanistan’s fragile U.S.-backed government. America’s longest war ended in ignominy and tragedy. The Islamist militants that had been chased from power in 2001 were back in command and the legacy of two decades of U.S.-led state-building and counterinsurgency that had drained more than $1 trillion from U.S. taxpayers and cost the lives of more than 3,500 U.S. and allied soldiers — and tens of thousands more Afghan troops and civilians — hung excruciatingly in the balance. Hours after the world watched the chaotic scenes at Kabul airport as thousands of Afghans desperately tried to flee the victorious Taliban advance, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a U.S. government ombudsman, issued a report on 20 years of U.S. efforts in the country. It was grim reading: “If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and pose little threat to U.S. national security interests, the overall picture is bleak,” the report noted. Billions of dollars in American and foreign aid may have been siphoned into boondoggles for corrupt Afghan officials and opportunistic U.S. military contractors. While the threat of extremist al-Qaeda militants operating on Afghan land was largely rooted out, ordinary Afghan civilians saw their country’s security situation grow more precarious amid constant terrorist bombings and attacks. A branch of the Islamic State found fertile soil in Afghanistan’s rugged terrain. And years of American efforts to shore up a fledgling Afghan government and train its new army did little to prevent its sudden and total collapse. As a result, a generation’s worth of fitful progress in advancing women’s education was derailed, with the Taliban reneging on earlier assurancesthat they would allow all schoolgirls to return to classes. Surging poverty has led to impoverished families selling their daughters as child brides. Tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted U.S. and international forces remain stuck in the country, vulnerable to a regime that sees them as having collaborated with foreign occupiers. In Washington, there’s plenty of lamentation over what went wrong. Some former military officials believe the United States was out of its depth culturally and could never graft its political system onto Afghanistan’s tribal landscape. Others pin more direct blame on former president Donald Trump, who signed a peace deal with the Taliban that critics argue doomed the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, and President Biden, who executed the full withdrawal even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes to the Taliban. “Our foundational mistake was our lack of commitment,” wrote David Petraeus, former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, for the Atlantic. “In essence, we never adopted a sufficient, consistent, overarching approach that we stuck with from administration to administration, or even within individual administrations.” That’s a difficult view to accept given the extent and length of the U.S.’s commitment to Afghanistan. As my colleagues reported in 2019, many U.S. officials tasked with carrying out counterinsurgency and reconstruction in Afghanistan privately knew the mission was failing, but in public spun a different message. “For a long time, Washington’s elites saw Afghanistan as the ‘good war,’ morally justified and sanctioned by the United Nations,” wrote Fareed Zakaria for The Washington Post’s opinion page. “People were invested in believing that it was working, and many blinded themselves to evidence that it wasn’t.” Now that the Washington establishment has been robbed of its delusions, Afghanistan has faded from view. Biden has repeatedly insisted the legacy campaigns of the post-9/11 era in Afghanistan and Iraq were obscuring the more important challenges facing U.S. strategists, who are now fully occupied by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the looming challenge posed by China. “I have been struck that much of Washington has appeared keen to essentially put Afghanistan in the rearview mirror and try to move on,” Michael Kugelman, an expert on South Asia at the Wilson Center, told Reuters. Many Afghans, meanwhile, are only looking ahead with despair. The evaporation of international aid to the country, compounded by U.S. sanctions that froze some $7 billion of Afghan foreign reserves, sent Afghanistan’s economy into a tailspin. The country’s banking system is paralyzed and food prices have soared. The majority of the Afghan population is in need of humanitarian assistance. More than half the population is going hungry and more than a million children are severely malnourished. The United Nations estimated that as much as 97 percent of the country may fall below the poverty line by the second half of the year. “Regardless of the Taliban’s status or credibility with outside governments, international economic restrictions are still driving the country’s catastrophe and hurting the Afghan people,” John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said in an Aug. 4 statement. In rural areas of the county devastated by years of war, the Taliban takeover seemed to offer a future of peace. But, as my colleague Susannah George recently reported from Helmand province, long a hotbed of insurgency, the country’s economic woes have darkened the mood. She encountered a mechanic in the town of Marja who had to rebuild his shop three times and now has seen a considerable drop in business. “Every time I started from scratch,” he told her, “and each time I had less money, so the shop has gotten smaller and smaller.” Unsurprisingly, that gloom is also felt in Kabul. My colleague Pamela Constable spoke to Sayed Hussain, the owner of a bridal gown business that has lost most of its customer base. “I am worried and upset all the time. Everyone in this country is upset,” Hussain said. “We have no idea what will happen next, or what our future will look like. When I see the hundreds of messages on Facebook, so many people trying to leave the country, it makes me think I should take my family and go.”

Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan Mark the End of the American Era? - Robin Wright (New Yorker)

Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan Mark the End of the American Era?

It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably.

By Robin Wright

The New Yorker, August 15, 2021

 

History will surely note this absurdly ill-timed tweet. On Monday, August 9th, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul posed a question to its four hundred thousand followers: “This #PeaceMonday, we want to hear from you. What do you wish to tell the negotiating parties in Doha about your hopes for a political settlement? #PeaceForAfghanistan.” The message reflected the delusion of American policy. With the Taliban sweeping across the country, storming one provincial capital after another, the prospect that diplomacy would work a year after U.S.-backed talks in Qatar began—and quickly stalled—was illusory. By Thursday, the Afghan government controlled only three major cities. President Joe Biden, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, announced that he was dispatching three thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan to pull hundreds of its diplomats and staff out of that Embassy. And, by Sunday, it was all over—before dusk. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, his government collapsed, and the U.S.-trained Afghan security forces simply melted away as the Taliban moved into the capital. American diplomats—having evacuated the fortress-like U.S. Embassy—were forced to shelter in place at the airport as they waited to be evacuated. America’s two-decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan has ended. For Americans, Afghanistan looks a little, maybe a lot, like a trillion-dollar throwaway. Meanwhile, Afghans are left in free fall.

It’s not just an epic defeat for the United States. The fall of Kabul may serve as a bookend for the era of U.S. global power. In the nineteen-forties, the United States launched the Great Rescue to help liberate Western Europe from the powerful Nazi war machine. It then used its vast land, sea, and air power to defeat the formidable Japanese empire in East Asia. Eighty years later, the U.S. is engaged in what historians may someday call a Great Retreat from a ragtag militia that has no air power or significant armor and artillery, in one of the poorest countries in the world.

It’s now part of an unnerving American pattern, dating back to the nineteen-seventies. On Sunday, social-media posts of side-by-side photos evoked painful memories. One captured a desperate crowd climbing up a ladder to the rooftop of a building near the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to get on one of the last helicopters out in 1975, during the Ford Administration. The other showed a Chinook helicopter hovering over the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Sunday. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, tried to argue on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” It didn’t wash. And there are other episodes. In 1984, the Reagan Administration withdrew the U.S. Marine peacekeepers from Beirut after a suicide bomber from a nascent cell of what became Hezbollah killed more than two hundred and forty military personnel—the largest loss for the Marines in a single incident since the Second World War. In 2011, the United States pulled out of Iraq, opening the way for the emergence of ISIS. The repeated miscalculations challenge basic Washington policy-making as well as U.S. military strategy and intelligence capabilities. Why wasn’t this looming calamity—or any of the earlier ones—anticipated? Or the exits better planned? Or the country not left in the hands of a former enemy? It is a dishonorable end.

Whatever the historic truth decades from now, the U.S. will be widely perceived by the world today as having lost what George W. Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—despite having mobilized NATO for its first deployment outside Europe or North America, a hundred and thirty-six countries to provide various types of military assistance, and twenty-three countries to host U.S. forces deployed in offensive operations. America’s vast tools and tactics proved ill-equipped to counter the will and endurance of the Taliban and their Pakistani backers. In the long term, its missiles and warplanes were unable to vanquish a movement of sixty thousand core fighters in a country about as big as Texas.

There are many repercussions that will endure long after the U.S. withdrawal. First, jihadism has won a key battle against democracy. The West believed that its armor and steel, backed by a generous infusion of aid, could defeat a hard-line ideology with a strong local following. The Taliban are likely, once again, to install Sharia as law of the land. Afghanistan will again, almost certainly, become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of Al Qaeda or others in search of a haven or a sponsor. It’s a gloomy prospect as Americans prepare to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks next month. Since 2001, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other jihadi extremists have seeded franchises on all six inhabited continents. Last month, the United States sanctioned an ISIS branch as far afield as Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony in southern Africa where almost sixty per cent of the population is Christian.

Second, both Afghanistan and Iraq have proved that the United States can neither build nations nor create armies out of scratch, especially in countries that have a limited middle class and low education rates, over a decade or two. It takes generations. Not enough people have the knowledge or experience to navigate whole new ways of life, whatever they want in principle. Ethnic and sectarian divisions thwart attempts to overhaul political, social, and economic life all at the same time. The United States spent eighty-three billion dollars training and arming an Afghan force of some three hundred thousand—more than four times the size of the Taliban’s militia. “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Mark Milley told reporters back in 2013. He is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet, by March, when I was last in Kabul, the Taliban controlled half of the country. Between May and mid-August, it took the other half—most just during the past week. Last month, Biden said that he trusted “the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped and more competent in terms of conducting war.” In the end, the Taliban basically walked into Kabul—and the Presidential palace—on Sunday.

Third, America’s standing abroad is profoundly weakened, symbolized by the U.S. Embassy’s lowering the Stars and Stripes for the final time on Sunday. Smoke was seen rising from the grounds of the Embassy—which cost almost eight hundred million dollars to expand just five years ago—as matériel was burned in the rush to exit. Washington will have a hard time mobilizing its allies to act in concert again—whether for the kind of broad and unified alliance, one of the largest in world history, that formed in Afghanistan after 9/11, or for the type of meagre cobbled-together “coalition of the willing” for the war in Iraq. The United States is still the dominant power in the West, but largely by default. There aren’t many other powers or leaders offering alternatives. It’s hard to see how the United States salvages its reputation or position anytime soon.

America’s Great Retreat is at least as humiliating as the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989, an event that contributed to the end of its empire and Communist rule. The United States was in Afghanistan twice as long and spent far more. The Soviet Union is estimated to have spent about fifty billion dollars during the first seven of its ten years occupying the mountainous country. Yes, the United States fostered the birth of a rich civil society, the education of girls, and an independent media. It facilitated democratic elections more than once and witnessed the transfer of power. Thirty-seven per cent of Afghan girls are now able to read, according to Human Rights Watch. The TOLO channel hosted eighteen seasons of “Afghan Star,” a singing competition much like “American Idol.” Zahra Elham, a twentysomething member of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, became the first woman to win, in 2019. But untold numbers of the Afghans encouraged by the United States are desperately searching for ways out of the country as the Taliban move in. Women have pulled out their blue burqas again. And the enduring imagery of the Americans flying out on their helicopters will be no different than Soviet troops marching across the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to the then Soviet Union on February 15, 1989. Both of the big powers withdrew as losers, with their tails between their legs, leaving behind chaos.

For the United States, the costs do not end with its withdrawal from either Afghanistan or Iraq. It could cost another two trillion dollars just to pay for the health care and disability of veterans from those wars. And those costs may not peak until 2048. America’s longest war will be a lot longer than anyone anticipated two decades ago—or even as it ends. In all, forty-seven thousand civilians have died, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. More than twenty-four hundred were U.S. military personnel, and almost four thousand were U.S. contractors.

I first went to Afghanistan in 1999, during the original Taliban rule. I drove through the breathtaking Khyber Pass from Pakistan, past the fortified estates of the drug lords along the border, on the rutted, axle-destroying roads to Kabul. The images of the Taliban’s repressive rule—little kids working on the streets of Afghan towns to support widowed mothers not allowed in public, checkpoints festooned with confiscated audio and video tapes—are indelible. I went back with Secretary of State Colin Powell on his first trip after the fall of the Taliban. There was hope then of something different, even as the prospect of it often seemed elusive, and the idea sullied by the country’s corrupt new rulers. I’ve been back several times since, including in March with General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, Jr., the head of Central Command, who is now overseeing the final U.S. military operations. On Sunday, as America erased its presence in Afghanistan in a race to get out, I wondered: Was it all for naught? What other consequences will America face from its failed campaign in Afghanistan decades from now? We barely know the answers.

---

 

Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

 

 

 

'This is not Saigon' (no, it's worse) - Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu (CNN Meanwhile in America)

 

CNN Meanwhile in America, August 16, 2021

 

 

 

Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

'This is not Saigon'

There is no end to the torment of the people of Afghanistan and Haiti. Both nations, desperately poor and plagued by violence, experienced brief glimpses of hope in recent decades, as foreign aid and muscle arrived with the hope of peace and rebuilding. But the agony of each deepened this weekend. Afghanistan is again largely under the boot of the Taliban as America’s 20-year misadventure ends in a rushed exit. And Haiti, hit by another murderous earthquake and still reeling from the assassination of its president, seems no better equipped to save itself than it was in 2010. 

 

 

 

What was it all for?

The Taliban is back in Kabul. Afghans are once again sliding into a new dark age of repression and persecution of women. And the United States is beating a humiliating retreat, becoming the latest superpower humbled in Central Asia’s graveyard of empires. 

 

The most immediate consequence of the militia’s blitzkrieg across Afghanistan is a political disaster for President Joe Biden who ordered all American troops out but failed to orchestrate an orderly withdrawal.

 

Pessimists have warned about a Saigon-style helicopter retreat from the US embassy for a while now. But most didn’t really think it could happen. Until Sunday. 

 

It now looks almost impossible that the US will succeed in extracting all the Afghans who acted as translators and fixers and in other roles for its forces over 20 years — and who face an awful fate if they are left behind. Former President Ashraf Ghani’s flight and the melting away of Afghan forces trained with billions of US and allied dollars without a fight — finally exposed the myths that Washington had allowed it to believe about "success" in the country. 

 

Ironically, those failures served to prove Biden’s rationale for leaving — that no amount of US blood and treasure could ever make Afghanistan a functioning, unified nation — at least the one dreamed of by US foreign policy planners. Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan has found out that in the modern era, America’s zeal to get into wars is only exceeded by its rush to get out of them, no matter the mess that is left behind.  Also spare a thought for the families of Afghan civilians killed by misdirected US fire. Or the relatives of Americans and allied troops from Canada, Britain, Italy, Australia and elsewhere who perished or left limbs on Afghan battlefields. 

 

America’s global reputation is meanwhile in for a shredding. The President who just toured Europe promising that “America is back” after the poison of the Trump years is presiding over a humiliating defeat. And Biden’s vows to fight for global democracy are now undermined by his own abandonment by a US-backed democratic government in Kabul. 

 

It’s not all Biden’s fault. He’s just carrying the can for the messy exit. Four US administrations tried covert warfare, bombing blitzes, occupation, nation building, troop surges, counter-insurgencies and troop drawdowns on Washington’s arbitrary timetables. It all led up to today. 

 

The question “what was it all for” is best answered by another one: Was US intervention ever going to end any other way?