There’s No Ideal Time to Screw Over the People Whose Country You Invaded: the US Finally Leaving Afghanistan

The United States’ departure from Afghanistan was as poorly planned and disastrous as its entrance and most of the time that our military spent in that country. Whether or not we should have been in Afghanistan in the first place is secondary to the fact that we didn’t seem to have a goddamn clue of what we were there to do.

Presumably we went in to hunt for Osama Bin Laden to get revenge for the 9/11 attacks. Then the rhetoric shifted to being about improving Afghan society, by building schools and infrastructure, improving the lives of the people, specifically women and girls, and aiding the imposition of a democratic government. Our prevailing purpose there, however, throughout the past twenty years, was fighting the Taliban. Arguably, we were less than successful, or completely failed, at each endeavor.

If the objective was to find and kill Osama Bin Laden, that was done over ten years ago. Except he was hiding in Pakistan. He had fled Afghanistan by 2002. There is evidence that those in the Bush administration in charge of the war didn’t even want to catch Bin Laden, at least not too early. The Taliban offered to surrender, and to turn Bin Laden over to a third country, but the capitalist warmonger Donald Rumsfeld refused, because ending the war so early wouldn’t have been profitable. Then, when US forces had Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda fighters pinned down in the Battle of Tora Bora, they were ordered to pull back, allowing his escape.

There were some investments and improvements made to the country and some of its people’s lives, if they weren’t among the tens of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions more affected by the war. These advances were mostly for urban citizens, in large gated cities like Kabul. For rural people, three quarters of the country, the US and Afghan security forces instead increased violence, poverty, and insecurity. But for those that did advance in the new Afghanistan that the US was propping up, whatever gains were made for people, their society, in terms of education, career opportunities, human rights, that’s all incredibly precarious and probably doomed. All the women that worked their way into careers, into the media, into government, are in particular danger.

In terms of defeating the Taliban and keeping them from returning to power, our efforts have been an utter failure. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were killed, along with thousands of American soldiers, in the US’s twenty year war with the Taliban. When the war started, they were prepared to surrender and abandon politics. But the US refused, and insisted on war, and in dragging it out helped swell the ranks of the Taliban and return them to power. The Taliban retook the cities and provinces from the US-supported Afghan government and now control more territory than they did in 2001. All but tiny pockets of contested land in Afghanistan is now under Taliban control. We spent trillions of dollars shooting and bombing, killing and dying, and left our enemy better positioned than when we first attacked them. Not only did the Taliban expand their power during our time there, and succeed in near total dominance as we fled, but they’ve also recovered much of the weapons and equipment we’d provided to the Afghan army. We sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives and spent a couple trillion dollars to give the Taliban more power and better weaponry.

That is an unequivocal failure.

That does not mean that we shouldn’t have left Afghanistan. While the time for withdrawal was arbitrary and the planning was very weak, we should have left Afghanistan. We should have left years ago. We shouldn’t have been at war there in the first place. Much as I hate Trump, and how he went about it in an idiot way and for the wrong reasons, as he did everything, he was right to start the ball rolling on ending the war. And deeply as I dislike Biden, and however poorly and disrespectfully he did it, he was right to follow through. He shouldn’t have excused the US’s failures and retreat by blaming the Afghan army for not being willing to fight for their own country. This was a callous and stupid thing to say, as the Afghan soldiers died by the tens of thousands in this war and only began surrendering in the face of certain brutal death as the US coalition forces fled and the Taliban stormed their way through the country.

Whichever set of flawed reasons led us to be there, it was from the beginning taken for granted that we had a right to invade Afghanistan and that we were doing the right thing there. With very rare exceptions, our military interventions, and our global interventions have in some respect always been militaristic, are not positive experiences for the people of those countries. Because every other thing we do is tied to military action, all of it is corrupted.

Even the ostensibly good things we were meant to be doing, like building schools and revolutionizing the Afghan education system, was largely unsuccessful, ruined by corruption and militarily based decisions. Schools were built and then abandoned, some were never built at all. Profiteers and warmongers in the US and Afghanistan took contracts, and a ton of US government money, and then didn’t actually build the schools.

That we propped up corrupt warlords and corrupt government officials and called it a functioning liberal democracy didn’t do the Afghan people many favors; it ensured the continuing low quality of life for most Afghans, the inevitable collapse of the government, and the eventual return of the Taliban. We promised, however disingenuously, and perhaps impossibly, to make everything better, and we didn’t deliver. We couched our purported humanitarianism in capitalism. Our “help” came with militarism and neoliberalism. From that starting point, there was no hope of a lasting positive outcome.

The travesty of the Afghanistan war is further evidence that no one should ally themselves with the US when we invade their country. Because we don’t mean what we say. Rather, our leaders don’t. Their motivations are always selfish. They make promises, pour in bombs and guns and money, get us mired in for years, then bail. The largest historical example is our devastation of Southeast Asia in the Vietnam war and then our hurried abandonment of the puppet government and army we’d propped up there, but there are many other instances of this behavior over the decades. We should never have invaded their country and none of them should have trusted us. All the Afghan soldiers, translators, aid workers, every native person who worked with the US military is screwed. We turned them into rebels with the assurance that we’d have their backs. They’re branded traitors by the Taliban, and the US government is doing little to get them out of harm’s way.