{"id":217248,"date":"2022-08-01T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=217248"},"modified":"2022-07-29T05:27:52","modified_gmt":"2022-07-29T04:27:52","slug":"the-afghan-debacle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/08\/the-afghan-debacle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Afghan Debacle"},"content":{"rendered":"

26 Jul 2022 – <\/em>Establishment journalists and politicians are despairingly asking: Why did we fail in our well-meaning efforts to help the Afghan people? What were our mistakes?<\/p>\n

Wrong questions as they ignore the first mistake: creating the Taliban.<\/p>\n

The USA\u2019s attempts to dominate Afghanistan and its resources began 40 years ago when Jimmy Carter in one of his last acts as president approved a CIA plan to overthrow the Afghan government. That government was no more dictatorial than others in the region, and it was implementing most of the humanitarian programs the USA later claimed it wanted to do: Women had equal rights and access to education, the country had freedom of religion and a well-functioning healthcare system. The rural infrastructure was being improved, and the standard of living was increasing. But the government was communist, and that meant it had to go, no matter how many people had to die.<\/p>\n

The people most willing to die killing communists were the Muslims who hated this secular government. The CIA helped them attack it, starting with raids on outposts and assassinations of local officials. The government asked the Soviet Union for help, and they sent in troops. The CIA stepped up its involvement, recruiting thousands of mujaheddin <\/em>fundamentalists, financing them, turning them into an army, and launching a full-scale war that brutalized the country for ten years and left two million dead, many of those children who starved in all the chaos. All the young people growing up knew was war. Atrocities were their norm, and they duplicated that later when they became Taliban fighters.<\/p>\n

Osama bin Laden and others who later formed the al-Qaeda and Taliban were all on the CIA payroll then fighting the communists. After they won the war, it was inevitable they’d take over the country. They were the strongest force.<\/p>\n

Once the Taliban were in power, the USA wasn’t concerned they were persecuting women, gays, and non-Muslims. They were just one of the many dictatorships the USA does business with and doesn’t object to.<\/p>\n

That changed, however, after 9\/11 when the Taliban became anti-capitalist, as they shifted away from a corporate-dominated economy and towards Islamic socialism. That made them a danger to Western interests. The final straw was when they refused to allow a US company to build an oil pipeline through the country.<\/p>\n

Suddenly the Western press was full of atrocity stories \u2013 some true, some lies \u2013 about how terrible the Taliban were. They became monsters who must be destroyed before they take over the world.<\/p>\n

The USA invaded Afghanistan after 9\/11 with a massive land and air assault\u00a0 (1) to capture Bin Laden and designated al-Qaeda terrorists, and (2) because the country had become anti-capitalist. The US military conquered Kabul installing Hamid Karzai, a figurehead President who had previously worked for the US company that wanted to build the pipeline. He was their guy, and the pipeline was at the top of his agenda.<\/p>\n

The Taliban merged back into the rural population, where they have deep roots. To find and kill them, the USA and its NATO partners unleashed a campaign of terror \u2013 house raids, brutal interrogations, drone strikes, infantry sweeps \u2013 that divided the rural population into two groups \u2013 the dead and the determined. The survivors were filled with the will to resist, and that proved stronger than American bombs and bullets. With the support of the people, 60,000 Taliban fighters triumphed over 300,000 soldiers in the government army and thousands of NATO troops financed by trillions of US dollars.<\/p>\n

The minority who didn\u2019t support the Taliban retreated to Kabul, and now the stories of their trying to flee the country are being used as propaganda to build the myth that the USA, although it unfortunately failed, was trying to do good and defeat evil. But now in the countryside most people are celebrating their victory over mighty America.<\/p>\n

This was truly a people\u2019s war, as in Vietnam. The Afghans and Vietnamese proved that the USA can\u2019t win a war against a country in which the majority of the people oppose them. Their victories are a tribute to the strength of the human spirit and a damning judgment of the USA\u2019s attempts to destroy it.<\/p>\n

Defeated on earth, the USA is now planning to wage war in space.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the surviving earthlings have learned a valuable lesson: If you unite, organize, and fight long and hard enough, you will win and free yourself from oppressors, whether it\u2019s the USA or the forces it helped create: the Taliban and al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>William T. Hathaway is a Special Forces combat veteran and an emeritus Fulbright professor of American Studies in Germany. His book<\/em> Radical Peace: People Refusing War<\/a> presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists who are working to change U.S. ‘warrior’ culture. His novel<\/em> Lila, the Revolutionary<\/a><\/strong> is a fable for adults about an eight-year-old girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice.<\/em> Hathaway’s novel of the climate change,<\/em> Wellsprings: A Fable of Consciousness, tells of an old woman and a young man healing nature through techniques of higher consciousness. Chapters are posted HERE<\/a>. His peace novel,<\/em> Summer Snow, is the story of an American soldier falling in love with a Sufi Muslim and learning from her that higher consciousness is more effective than violence. Chapters are posted HERE<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Jul 2022 – Establishment journalists and politicians are despairingly asking: Why did we fail in our well-meaning efforts to help the Afghan people? What were our mistakes? Wrong questions as they ignore the first mistake: creating the Taliban.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":214556,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[93,703,133,2900,484,70,1468],"class_list":["post-217248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-afghanistan","tag-al-qaeda","tag-cia","tag-mujaheddin","tag-taliban","tag-usa","tag-ussr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}