The catastrophe created in Afghanistan long predates Trump’s dismal negotiating with the Taliban for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and his release of high value Taliban members from detention; though as with everything Trump did, he exacerbated the catastrophe by an order of magnitude which is visible in the picture of Taliban commanders in the Kabul Presidential Palace, at least one of whom Trump released, as well as the now head of Afghanistan’s now Taliban government, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, whom Trump had released from a prison in Pakistan in 2018.
The catastrophe, in fact, predates the George W. Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan after rejecting the Taliban’s offer to arrest Osama Bin Laden out of hand. Bin Laden, it turns out, wasn’t even in Afghanistan at the time and was years later found in Pakistan where he was assassinated. The catastrophe was essentially initiated when the United States decided to organize and arm the mujahideen to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It was for this reason that the Saudi Arabian prince named Osama Bin Ladin went from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan in the very first instance.
After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the seminal events of the new millennium, the United States stopped taking such a direct, hands-on approach to organizing and arming the mujahideen. After the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan the U.S. role in organizing the mujahideen took the form of setting up and running torture chambers for people who may or may not have had anything at all to do with terrorist organizations. In fact, the U.S. offered money for suspects which in large measure amounted to Afghan citizens turning in otherwise innocent Afghans who they didn’t get along with. The W. Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was essentially an afterthought as they had been itching to invade and occupy Iraq. It follows that the U.S. immediately set up and ran torture sites in Iraq, such as at Camp Bucca where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was imprisoned and used the time to network with the radical Islamists who were there and who later formed the Islamic State. Everything that the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq surely eclipsed Bin Laden’s wildest dreams and served the radical Islamist movements as the most powerful recruiting tool. The United States began by directly organizing and arming the mujahideen, elements of which later formed al-Qaida, and ended up secondarily organizing and radicalizing the radical Islamist organizations by imprisoning suspected terrorists and completely innocent civilians who were either misidentified or deceitfully turned in for money by a local who had personal grievances along with legitimate war lords and terrorists; the war lords, that is, the United States was not actively supporting and working with.
The United States’ war in Afghanistan has ended as it began, with the remote killing by an armed drone of ten Afghanis of the same family, seven of whom were children. The final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, twenty years late in the coming, is a very welcome event, but as the drone strike illustrates, the U.S. military presence hasn’t completely departed. That President Biden kept to the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops that Trump negotiated with the Taliban, presented a cogent assessment of war and it’s devastating effects with the corporate media background consisting in fraudulent ‘analysis’ conjured by the military industrial complex, is very welcome indeed. We must hope for and work towards the Biden administration not acquiescing to the military industrial complex and further entangling the United States in any more of the ‘war on terror’ cult’s forever wars.
Serious effort must be made to help evacuate Afghanis who helped and worked with the United States and various NATO/international forces and NGO organizations. Similar efforts must be made in the form of reparations and aid for the civilians, as while the United States' collective taxpayer funded the catastrophe in Afghanistan for twenty years to the tune of $300,000,000 daily, which mostly wound up back in the U.S. with defense contractors and the like, while that which remained in Afghanistan was grotesquely funneled to local war lords and other corrupt politicians and actors. Beyond aid and reparations for Afghanis following two full decades of U.S. military devastation, it would be appropriate for the U.S. to unfreeze Afghanistan’s funds so that the general populace of Afghanistan isn’t subject to further unnecessary suffering and misery.
