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Destruction Is All We Have to Show for a 15-Year War in Afghanistan
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/destruction_is_all_we_have_to_show_for_1
5-year_war_in_afghanistan_20161007/
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Posted on Oct 7, 2016
By Sonali Kolhatkar
A protest against former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in
Afghanistan. (Massoud Hossaini /
AP(http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Afghanistan-Peace-Deal/647c845b500
5436e80d971abfb11ce48/3/0) )
The longest war in United States history has warranted barely any mentions
during the presidential or vice presidential debates. Afghanistan was
discussed once in passing during each event, even though the U.S. has spent
hundreds of billions of dollars on the nation over 15 years and it is
unraveling faster than ever.
Since its beginning, the Afghanistan war was the forgotten stepsister of the
Iraq War. Shellshocked by the 9/11 attacks, liberals gave President George
W. Bush a pass when he launched the first airstrikes on Oct. 7, 2001, and
bought himself time to build a case for a war in Iraq-the more desirable
target to him. Millions around the world marched against the Iraq War in
early 2003, incensed about the clearly manufactured evidence of "weapons of
mass destruction." Far fewer activists felt the same moral outrage over
Afghanistan's misery, as if the entire country was to blame for the sins of
al-Qaida. That double standard was reflected in Barack Obama's 2008
presidential bid when he promised to ramp down the Iraq War while expanding
the Afghan war. From the start, Afghanistan suffered from what my co-author
James Ingalls and I called "the propaganda of silence" in our 2006 book,
"Bleeding
Afghanistan(http://www.democracynow.org/2006/10/6/bleeding_afghanistan_washi
ngton_warlords_and_the) ."
Over nearly the entire four terms combined of Bush and Obama, the U.S. has
pummeled Afghanistan with air fire. Bombing of civilians continues today. A
U.S.
airstrike(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/un-in-afghanista
n-says-15-civilians-killed-in-us-air-strike/2016/09/29/855e7904-8662-11e6-b5
7d-dd49277af02f_story.html) on Sept. 28, reportedly intended for Islamic
State militants, resulted in the deaths of 15 civilians who had gathered to
greet a returning elder from his Saudi Arabian pilgrimage to Hajj.
Reflexively, U.S. officials, as has been the practice from the start of the
war, offered to investigate the matter. While U.S. ground troops have been
reduced to a few thousand today, down from tens of thousands, the appearance
of Islamic State in Afghanistan has put any ideas of troop withdrawal on
hold.
Fifteen years into the Afghanistan war, women remain insecure and targeted
by fundamentalist violence. Afghan women's rights provided a convenient
justification for the launch of the war. Along with retribution for 9/11,
Americans hoped to enjoy the satisfaction of freeing Afghan women from the
clutches of the evil, misogynist Taliban. The only problem is that women's
rights do not materialize from war, and Afghanistan was no exception. Just
as the U.S. installed fundamentalist warlords in Afghanistan in the 1970s
and '80s as part of its proxy war with the Soviet Union, it re-empowered
many of the same men, widely considered war criminals, in its fight against
the Taliban. Today, under Taliban-controlled areas, women suffer.
And almost everywhere else in Afghanistan, women also suffer. Amnesty
International reported that 4,000 cases of violence against
women(https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/afghanistan/
report-afghanistan/) were reported in the past nine months, and
acknowledged that such incidents are severely underreported. Last December,
a horrific case emerged of a mob of men beating a woman named Farkhunda
Malikzada(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/world/asia/flawed-justice-after-
a-mob-killed-an-afghan-woman.html) to death in broad daylight after falsely
accusing her of burning a Koran.
Fifteen years into the Afghanistan war, the Taliban remains active, working
feverishly to retake the country, of which they controlled 90 percent in
2001. Now, Afghan National Army forces backed by the U.S. are fighting to
push out Taliban
forces(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/world/asia/flawed-justice-after-a-m
ob-killed-an-afghan-woman.html) from the key northern city of Kunduz, a
major battlefield in 2001 between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance
warlords. After being driven out of much of the country in 2001, the Taliban
is now stronger than ever and has retaken more
land(http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2016/06/16/afghani
stan-nicholson-commander-pentagon-report-war/85972056/) than at any other
point during the war. The United Nations recorded nearly 3,500 civilian
deaths in
2015(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/world/asia/afghanistan-record-civilia
n-casualties-2015-united-nations.html) , a record high. A majority of those
deaths were at the hands of the Taliban, a group of militants the U.S. has
spent 15 years fighting.
The non-Taliban warlords in Afghanistan also remain strong today, and none
of them have been brought to justice for their past crimes. In fact, many
have been rewarded with political office such as Chief Executive Abdullah
Abdullah and Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum, who both have notoriously
violent pasts. The most audacious example is former Prime Minister Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, whose mass crimes have been rewarded with government-funded
security and legal immunity through a widely hailed "peace
deal(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/world/asia/afghanistan-peace-deal-hez
b-i-islami.html) " signed just weeks ago. Hekmatyar, once known as the
"Butcher of
Kabul(http://www.france24.com/en/20160922-gulbuddin-hekmatyar-afghan-ex-pm-b
utcher-kabul) ," received a whopping $600 million from the U.S. during the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and was, according to historian and U.S.
foreign policy critic William Blum, known to the CIA and U.S. State
Department
officials(https://williamblum.org/chapters/killing-hope/afghanistan) as
"scary," "vicious," "a fascist" and "definite dictatorship material." He
once fought the Soviets for the U.S., then fought the U.S. for the Soviets.
He also fought against his fellow warlords, joined the Taliban and then
fought against the Taliban. As part of its deal, the U.S.-backed Afghan
government, which has promised to press for an end to sanctions against him,
will allow Hekmatyar to "re-establish himself in the capital and join the
political process," with the promise of an "honorary post" in the
government. In 2003, the State Department named Hekmatyar a "Specially
Designated Global
Terrorist(https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/17799.htm) ."
Today, Secretary of State John Kerry has given his blessing to the "peace
deal(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/afghan-warlord-peace-deal-model-tal
iban-reconciliation-suggests/) ," implying that it could be a model for
dealing with other war criminals and the Taliban.
Fifteen years into the Afghanistan war, the U.S. has spent record amounts of
money with little to show for it. In fact, the U.S. has spent more money on
Afghanistan than it did on the entire European continent after World War II.
In current dollars, the U.S. spent $103 billion on 16 European nations over
four years as part of its Marshall Plan. U.S. expenditures in Afghanistan
have now exceeded that
amount(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-31/afghanistan-has-cos
t-the-u-dot-s-dot-more-than-the-marshall-plan) . Of that amount, ProPublica,
in an investigative report(https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/afghan)
, found that at least $17 billion was simply wasted, citing "bad decisions,
bad purchases and bad programs" on the part of the U.S. government. Military
contractors, like Afghan trucking-company owner Hikmatullah
Shadman(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/the-man-who-made-millio
ns-off-the-afghan-war) , became spectacularly rich. The latest
report(https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-16-58-LL.pdf) of the
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) admitted
that "the United States partnered with warlords and their militias," and
"[w]hen these strongmen and other elites gained positions of power in the
Afghan government, they often engaged in rampantly corrupt activities."
According to the SIGAR report, "the U.S. government also failed to recognize
that billions of dollars injected into a small, underdeveloped country, with
limited oversight and strong pressures to spend, contributed to the growth
of corruption." Some of the money has even ended up in the hands of the
Taliban(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-us-money-
ends-up-in-taliban-hands/2011/07/24/gIQAzHQdXI_graphic.html) . We can rest
assured that ordinary Afghans have been last among the beneficiaries of U.S.
largesse.
As its longest war continues with no end in sight, what does the U.S. have
to show for it? In many ways Afghanistan is depressingly right back where it
started 15 years ago, a time when it was already a war-weary nation.
Warlords and fundamentalist militants once more rule the country and fight
one another while the West continues its ground and air operations. Ordinary
Afghans remain repressed and tragically impoverished. Perhaps mention of the
war has remained elusive during this presidential election race simply
because both major parties are equally to blame for the debacle that Bush
began and Obama continued.
Maybe there is a silent agreement to not expose the truth of the decade and
a half of devastation we have wrought on a poor nation. As the Afghan hero
and women's rights activist Malalai Joya once
said(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cost_of_courage_malalai_joyas_l
ife-risking_activism_20131010) , "This endless U.S.-led war on terror ... is
in fact a war against the Afghan people." Perhaps that is the shameful
admission that we cannot bring ourselves to utter.
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