Read time: 15 minutes
Twenty years ago today, on September 18, 2001, George W. Bush signed Senate Joint Resolution 23, the "Authorization for Use of Military Force." Around that time he began using words and phrases like ‘evildoers’ and ‘Axis of Evil’. He drew a line in the sand and essentially threatened the world with having to make a decision:
“Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.”
In Part One of this series, I referenced an article by Richard Hanania that cast doubt on the narratives recently pushed by those who have called for sustained ‘low-grade’ presence in Afghanistan. While villainizing the Taliban comes easy, there’s less talk about our having provided cover for the atrocities committed by the Afghan forces we propped up.
Double standards like these extend far beyond the borders of Afghanistan. In an article for UnHerd, Aris Roussinos explains:
It is strange to see an American foreign policy establishment which urges American engagement or even support for Syrian jihadist factions ideologically indistinct from the Taliban so distraught at the outcome in Afghanistan. If a qualified outreach can be made to even former al-Qaeda factions in Syria, including ones led by veterans of the Afghan jihad deployed by the al-Qaeda leader himself, on the basis that they promise not to attack the West, then it is difficult to see why the same logic cannot be applied further from the West’s shores.
Currently engaged in Ph.D. research looking at rebel governance in Northeast Syria, Roussinos offers some insight on built-in barriers to foreign interventions:
The dependency on external powers taints the central government it is intended to support in the eyes of traditional rural populations, who are generally unsupportive of foreign occupations. The counterinsurgency, or COIN doctrine, is based on a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of political legitimacy: local actors, embedded within and drawn from the ranks of local populations, will almost always be able to outcompete both the central state and even the most well-meaning and idealistic of colonial administrators in the battle for hearts and minds.
To call Roussinos optimistic might be a stretch, but the tone of his article is certainly one of practicality and acceptance of what is, rather than what might be if only [fill in the blank]. His outlook on the prospects for Afghanistan under today’s Taliban is an example of this:
As the rebel governance literature shows, most violence occurs when control of a country is contested between two forces of more or less equal reach: once firm dominance is established by either party, local legitimacy tends to be achieved by amnesties in exchange for submitting to the victor’s authority, a process which we see occur in civil war after civil war. In any case, it must be noted that the measured application of brutality as often affords local legitimacy as it erodes it. The Taliban began, after all, as a local protest movement against the sexual abuse of young boys by warlord militia commanders, who they then hanged from tank barrels to local acclaim.
But the Taliban doesn’t just seek local legitimacy: for their rule to thrive they also need international legitimacy, and though it is very early days, much of their recent output seems designed to secure it. They have already reassured both China and Russia that they have no desire to export disorder beyond their borders, and are likely to be rewarded with recognition, and even investment.
Three Taliban militiamen dance alongside one of their tanks at a position some 15 kms north of Kabul Saturday November 9, 1996 on their way to the front line. | Santiago Lyon/AP Photo
Whether or not the Taliban will find the capacity for more diplomacy and less violence remains to be seen. I’m not optimistic. But if history is any guide, I’m even less optimistic that any lessons will be learned by Western masters of war - none that will be put to good use anyway.
In a scathing article for The Guardian, Nesrine Malik contrasts reckless grandiosity with its sobering human toll.
In August 1998, two weeks after a little-known terror outfit called al-Qaida announced itself to the world with bomb attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the US president, Bill Clinton, retaliated with missile strikes against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Central Khartoum was rocked in the middle of the night by the impact of a dozen Tomahawk missiles, which destroyed the plant, killing a night watchman and wounding 11 others. The US claimed that the factory – which was the largest provider of medicines in a country under sanctions – was secretly producing nerve agents on behalf of al-Qaida, but it didn’t take long for American officials to admit that the “evidence … was not as solid as first portrayed”.
The attack, in other words, was simply an act of retaliation against a random target, without any connection to the crime purportedly being avenged. I was a university student in Khartoum at the time. I can remember the confusion the day after the explosions, then visiting the shattered site of the factory with other students. What was suddenly clear to us then, standing in front of the ruins in a sleepy city that had supposedly become the centre of Islamic terrorism overnight, was the real logic of the “war on terror”: our lives were fodder for the production of bold headlines in American newspapers, saluting the strength, swift action and resolve of western leaders. We, on the sharp end of it all, would never be the protagonists. Those were the policy and opinion makers far, far away, for whom our experience was merely the resolution of an argument about themselves. The operation was chillingly, but appropriately, called Infinite Reach.
There was never any admission of this error, no apology given or responsibility taken. Individual Clinton administration officials conceded here and there that the intelligence was maybe not exactly right, but nobody suffered the slightest punishment for getting it wrong. The owner of the factory, which was never rebuilt, brought a case against the US in an American court. The case was thrown out.
For more than two decades, this has been the governing logic of the war on terror: US and British leaders make the “difficult and brave” moral decisions, and then someone else worries about the consequences. The chaos in Kabul is simply the latest instalment in a long-running drama whose protagonists never change. There is no closure and no responsibility.
To see the goalposts moving only scratches the surface. The stated aims of war are just facades thrown up and reshaped by whim, appearing and disappearing as if in a hall of mirrors, to gaslight into confusion and, through crisis and fear, strongarm into allegiance the population who ultimately absorbs the costs of war, turning them into its biggest cheerleaders, ensnared by lies but desperate to believe. Malik continues:
The very purpose of the war on terror was always being modified and revised: what has just ended with Joe Biden’s cold and steely realpolitik began with sweeping moral claims about liberating Afghan women and building an inclusive democracy. Biden insisted last week that this was never the mission – but that would be news to Laura Bush, who in 2001 became the first First Lady to deliver an entire weekly presidential radio address, dedicating it to the plight of women in Afghanistan. The truth is that the only consistent element in all the justifications for the war, be they moral or geopolitical, was the imperative tone. Whatever was done had to be so, and we could debate the reasons later on.
In that climate of certainty, voices of doubt were easily dismissed as timid and fearful, lazy and disloyal. Consequences be damned – we had our convictions. The small print, of course, was that those damning the consequences had no risk of encountering them. “The result is irrelevant,” Daniel Finkelstein declared in a 2011 Times column as his friend David Cameron’s intervention in Libya started to show signs of failure. “We were right to attack.”
As the reasons for intervention changed, so did the benchmarks for its virtue. And so the war on terror became an issue that was only argued through its symbols of success or failure, in moments of crisis or high-octane action.
Andrew Quilty for Rolling Stone
Malik sees narcissism lurking behind those symbols of success and failure, where the successes are ‘because of’ and the failures are ‘in spite of’. There may be variance in details, but every story is told in the same style, from the same point of view, with the same heroes shaping the same narrative arc.
The fossilisation of those very influential circles, in ideology and cast, has ensured that there will be little honest reflection on the many failures in Afghanistan. So many of the same dodgy salesmen who peddled the faulty war decades ago are still here, trying to sell us spare parts to keep it on the road. Within a month of invading Afghanistan in 2001, the influential New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman was already pleading with his fellow Americans to “give war a chance”. Twenty years of columns later, he is now lamenting that “America tried to defend itself from terrorism emanating from Afghanistan by trying to nurture it to stability and prosperity”, but “too many Afghans” rejected the gift.
The fall of Kabul will be another missed opportunity to reflect on a default setting of retaliate in haste and retreat at leisure. You will instead hear a lot in the media about what this says about us, about the fall or “defeat” of the west – always the main character in the tragedy that has befallen only others. There will be more in the fine tradition of oratory in the British parliament that flourishes with the moral purpose of intervention, and you will hear a lot about betrayal of Afghan women. But you will hear little from those establishments about the reality of a war that, in the end, from Sudan to Iraq to Afghanistan, was about high-profile revenge enacted on low-profile soft targets. It was not about ending terror, or freeing women, but demonstrating Infinite Reach.
As depressing as this story is, I hope it provokes reflection on the massive costs of war: the monetary costs, the opportunity costs, the costs in reputation and blowback, and, of course, the human costs; not only the lives of Americans, but of all people whose countries have become arenas of bloodshed; and not only them, but those who have survived only to lose limbs, marriages, psychological well-being, or things once a part of who they were that neither they nor their families know how to get back.
In another post to come, I will link to key articles that were quoted at length in this series, as well as some important books, reports, and investigations. Please consider subscribing or sharing. Thank you for reading.