Write Ida Dominijanni in 2001. An archive, just published by the Manifestolibri publishing house: “The coincidence between the twentieth anniversary of 11 September and the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan closes the circle of twenty years of history that seem to be returning to the starting point. The images of Kabul airport burst from the unprepared mid-August news programs like a nemesis, with those falling men that fall from the carts of the planes taking off and bring to mind the chilling images of the women and men who threw themselves from the upper floors of the burning towers twenty years ago.
The apocalypse reappears in the headlines, but this time there is no kamikaze alien to whom it can be attributed: the West did it all by itself. Even the comparison of the American helicopter retreating from Kabul with the one fleeing Saigon does not hold up much: Vietnam was an American defeat, Afghanistan is a debacle of the West, aligned with the United States in a revanchist response to the 9/11 attacks that was doomed to defeat from its starting contradictions.
The global war on terror it is lost, and the ‘Western identity’ that was so committed to it comes out unmasked and discredited. Not only because in the shadow of the resettled Islamic Emirate the terrorist threat can recur, in spite of the Doha agreements signed with the Taliban by Trump. But because the dissolution of the Afghan government in the face of the American withdrawal and the return of the Taliban demonstrates all the inconsistency of the rhetoric on the export of democracy, on the ‘liberation from the burqa’ and on the nation building which, although Biden denies it today, served as an ideological outfit and basis for legitimizing the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Democracy cannot be exported with arms and women do not free themselves from patriarchy with wars between men, we shouted in the pacifist squares of 2001 and 2003 and we were right ”.
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