United States, cruel and clumsy imperialism

Afghanistan: seventeen years of war and still going

The shock of 9/11 drove the United States to apoplexy. The immediate aftermath left Americans with little appetite for namby-pamby contemplation of the attackers’ grievances, much less a desire to u+nderstand the internal political dynamics of the country on which they were keen to vent their outrage. (Which would have been difficult in any case, considering that, in 2002, only 1 in 6 young American adults aged 18 to 24 could locate Afghanistan on a map.) It certainly wasn’t the moment to ask, rhetorically, what Jesus would have done. It was time for vengeance, served at the sizzling temperature of a white phosphorus incendiary bomb. All but blind to the indigenous cultural landscape, they went in swinging.

Afghanistan hosts a complex web of rival tribal factions; the 2004 constitution recognizes 14 different ethnicities. In 1992, a coalition of Tajiks and Uzbeks wrested power from the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group. In response, the late Mullah Omar formed the Taliban in order to reassert Pashtun hegemony and establish strict Islamic law in place of what had been virtual anarchy during the civil war and communist rule before that. Ali A. Jalali and Lester W. Grau recall that the Taliban — which, in Pashto, translates literally to “students” — “received extensive support from Pashtuns across the country who thought that the movement might restore their national dominance.” The Taliban is as much an ethnic movement as it is an Islamist organization.

American leaders might have realized this, too, had they bothered to ask questions first and shoot later. Instead, Chua explains:

The United States… joined forces with the Northern Alliance, led by Tajik and Uzbek warlords and widely viewed as anti-Pashtun. The Americans then set up a government that many Pashtuns believed marginalized them.

… Although many Pashtuns loathed the Taliban, few were willing to support a government they viewed as subordinating their interests to those of their deeply resented ethnic rivals.

Needless to say, it was a poor recipe for winning the trust of the people among whom the U.S. and its allies would be operating for the next 17 years and counting.

Blood and Treasure

The human cost of the Afghan adventure has been staggering. If and when statistics of the war’s casualties receive public attention, they’re almost always those of Western forces: over 3500 coalition fatalities as of 2018, more than 2,400 of whom were American, and over 20,000 injuries to U.S. troops.

Unless you go out of your way to seek the data, you’re unlikely to encounter the rest of the story — which is to say the bulk of it. Since 2001, over 30,000  Afghan civilians have died violently, and more than 100,000 have died in total with another 40,000 civilians injured on top of that. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) notes that in 2018, civilian casualties numbered above 5,000 for the third year running, more than double the 2009 level.

The full human toll is also not entirely visible. More than 138,000 U.S. veterans of Afghanistan are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2009, it was reported that 2 in 3 Afghans had mental health problems. Worse still, as the world’s main source of opium and heroin, Afghanistan is gripped by a drug addiction crisis.

The United Nations estimated in 2015 that there were perhaps 1.6 million drug users living in Afghan cities — a 70 percent increase from 2009 — and as many as 3 million more in the countryside. That would represent a jaw-dropping 13 percent of the country’s population, dwarfing the opioid crisis currently ravaging parts of North America. Land use dedicated to poppy production in Afghanistan has tripled since the war began. Efforts have been made to destroy the poppy fields to deny the Taliban a source of revenue, even though doing so could be financially ruinous to many ordinary Afghans as well since opiate exports make up a quarter of Afghanistan’s GDP.
Author: Brad Stollery
Reproduced from:
https://medium.com/s/story/the-graveyard-of-empires-eac97e6af1c