THE tragedy of the US’s 20-year war in Afghanistan goes far beyond the devastation it left in its wake, but the fact that it is bound to do it all over again.
US policy makers and generals have learnt nothing from the fiasco of the longest war in their history. After Vietnam, they said they would learn from their mistakes, but their mindset never changed, and their strategic decisions in Afghanistan were even more flawed.
It is only a matter of time before the US intervenes militarily in another country, decimating its infrastructure, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and fuelling extremism among the local population as a result of its gross human rights violations.
What is the point to all this mayhem? The $2 trillion the US spent on a war that never achieved its objectives, and will bring back the Taliban stronger than before, could have gone towards developing a public health-care system in the US, improving its education, and creating jobs. That would have built social cohesion and reduced extremism in the US, but the military industrial complex will never let such progressive thinking win the day. It will always drag the US into unwanted and unnecessary military conflagrations that keep the weapons churning out.
But the real victims are the Afghans themselves, who endure endless political instability, bombings, growing extremism, devastated infrastructure, huge power shortages, and an untrammelled trade in opium and heroin. Yes, it is true that millions of Afghan girls have been able to go to school and Afghan women have participated in public life, including holding political office, in greater numbers than ever before. But the achievement is eclipsed by the reality that Afghanistan is a country that lies in ruins, and its political establishment of US allies are despised for their corruption, illegitimacy and inability to govern.
US forces killed more than 100 000 Afghan civilians in this war. When former president Donald Trump increased air operations, loosening rules on targeting and removing directives prohibiting strikes on residential buildings, civilian casualties soared. Under his administration, 40% of all civilian casualties from airstrikes were children. By mid-2019, civilian casualties caused by US forces and the Afghan government briefly surpassed those carried out by the Taliban and Islamic State.
Examples of US war crimes in Afghanistan are endless but just two examples are the sustained US airstrikes in 2009 in western Farah province that killed almost 100 civilians, mostly children who were blown to pieces. And there was the shocking US gunship attack on a MSF hospital which killed 42 patients, doctors and medical staff.
The warlords who the US empowered during its two decades of war have presided over the most vicious human rights violations, the crimes of which were often carried out in US black sites or torture centres. US forces not only committed egregious torture and mass murder of civilians themselves, but they were the enablers of Afghan warlords who learnt from the methods employed by US troops, and carried out their own war crimes on a massive scale throughout the country, which the US encouraged in exchange for the promised protection of US troops.
From 2001 until as late as 2016, the Northern Alliance forces who were allied to the US carried out systemic attacks on Pashtun villages, raping women, summarily executing civilians, stealing livestock and land. Dostrum, a warlord allied to the US, had massacred 2 000 Taliban prisoners in 2001 who were dumped in a mass grave. Sherzai, a tribal leader allied to the US, had imprisoned and tortured Taliban fighters who had written to the then new Afghan president Hamid Karzai and offered to lay down their arms. They were imprisoned and tortured by the intelligence agency NDS created by the CIA. They, along with countless others, were tortured to death in NDS prisons and at CIA black sites.
Persistent human rights abuses by warlords backed by the US fuelled widespread resentment and swelled the ranks of the Taliban. As a result, by 2005 the Taliban were gaining ground and carrying out their own atrocities that involved suicide bombings, attacks on civilian officials, and on girls’ schools.
When US policy makers evaluate what went wrong in Afghanistan they focus on the need for more troops, looser rules of engagement, and their strategy and tactics. They miss the critical lessons altogether.
It was the widespread human rights abuses committed by US and Afghan forces, as well as the corruption and maladministration of US allies that ensured failure. The US approach to centralising power in Kabul was also deeply flawed, given the history of Afghanistan being based on relatively autonomous regions and provinces.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the British invasions before it made the same mistakes, and like the Americans, they had alienated the local population. The Americans made those same mistakes in Somalia and elsewhere they occupied, and will continue to do so as they disregard the territorial sovereignty of other nations and they ignore the lessons of history.
* Ebrahim is Independent Media Group Foreign Editor.