The brutal helplessness of the United States – Arundhati Roy

In February 1989 the last Soviet tank left Afghanistan after its army was defeated in a nearly ten-year war by a coalition of mujahideen (trained, armed, financed and indoctrinated by the US and Pakistani intelligence services). In November of that year, the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Union began to crumble. When the Cold War ended, the United States took over the reins of the world order. In the blink of an eye, radical Islam replaced communism as the most imminent threat to world peace. After the 9/11 attacks, the political world as we knew it has rotated on its axis. And the pivot of that axis seemed to be somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan.

As the United States makes its ignominious exit from Afghanistan, talk of its decline and the rise of China multiplies. For Europe, and particularly for the United Kingdom, Washington’s economic and military might has provided a kind of cultural continuity, effectively maintaining the status quo. A ruthless new power waiting in the wings to take their place must be a source of deep concern. In other parts of the world, where the status quo has brought untold suffering, news from Afghanistan has been received with less fear.

The day the Taliban entered Kabul I was in the mountains of Tosa Maidan, a pasture in the highlands of Kashmir that the Indian military and air force have used for decades to practice artillery and aerial bombardment. From there we could look at the valley below us, dotted with cemeteries where tens of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims who died in the state’s struggle for self-determination are buried.

Points of view
In India, the Bharatiya janata party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party, came to power by exploiting international hostility towards Islam after 9/11. The BJP sees itself as a staunch ally of the United States. The Indian security establishment is aware that the Taliban victory marks a structural change in the politics of the subcontinent, which involves three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and which has its critical point in Kashmir. It sees the Taliban’s assertion as a victory for its deadly enemy, Pakistan, which has secretly supported the Islamist movement in its 20-year battle against the US occupation. The 175 million Muslims of mainland India, already brutalized, ghettoized, stigmatized as “Pakistanis” – and now, increasingly, as “Taliban” – are even more at risk of discrimination and persecution.

In recent years, most of the Indian media, embarrassingly enslaved to the BJP, have defined the Taliban as a terrorist group. Many Kashmiri residents, who have lived for decades with Indian guns pointed at them, read the news differently, with hope, because they were looking for glimmers of light. The details and consequences of what was happening were not yet clear. But some of the people I spoke to saw those events as the victory of Islam against the most powerful army in the world. Others as a sign that no power can stop a sincere struggle for freedom. They firmly believed that the Taliban had totally changed and abandoned their barbaric methods.

The irony of it is that these conversations took place in 2020, while we were sitting on a lawn full of bomb craters. Independence Day was celebrated in India and Kashmir had been militarized to avoid protests. On that border, the armies of India and Pakistan were engaged in a face-to-face fraught with tension. On the other, in the neighboring region of Ladakh, the Chinese army had crossed the border line and was encamped on Indian territory. Afghanistan seemed very close.

In their numerous military expeditions, the United States destroyed one country after another. They have unleashed militias, killed millions, overthrew democracies and supported tyrants and military occupations. They have deployed an updated version of British colonial rhetoric that they are taking part in a civilizing mission. So it was with Vietnam. And so with Afghanistan.

Just look at the subsequent episodes of recent history. The Soviets, the US and Pakistani-backed mujahideen, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance jihadists, the warlords, and the US and NATO military have boiled the bones of the Afghan people in a broth of blood. . All have committed crimes against humanity and helped create the breeding ground for terrorists such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State group and their affiliates.

If honorable “intentions” such as the emancipation of women are to be considered mitigating factors in military invasions, then certainly both the Soviets and the Americans can claim to have elevated, educated and empowered a small fraction of Afghan women, before driving them back into a seething cauldron of medieval misogyny. But neither democracy nor feminism can be dropped like bombs from the sky. Afghan women will continue to fight for their freedom in their own way.

Does the US withdrawal mark the beginning of the end of their hegemony? Will Afghanistan live up to its reputation as a graveyard of empires? Maybe not. Despite the horror show at Kabul airport, the withdrawal may not be as hard a blow for the United States as is led to believe. Much of the billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan went back to the US war industry, which includes arms manufacturers, mercenaries, logistics and infrastructure companies, and non-profit organizations. Most of the lives lost during the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (estimated at around 170,000 by researchers at US Brown University) were of Afghans who, in the eyes of the invaders, count for little. And if you exclude crocodile tears, even the 2,400 American soldiers killed don’t count for much.

The Taliban humiliated the United States. The Doha agreement, signed by both parties in 2020 for a peaceful transfer of power, is proof of this. But the withdrawal could also reflect a cynical calculation by Washington in a rapidly changing world. With the economies ravaged by lockdown and since covid-19, and with technology, gigantic data collection and artificial intelligence making a new kind of war possible, maintaining control of a territory is less necessary than in the past. Why not let Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran get bogged down in Afghanistan – where there will be economic collapse and another civil war – keeping US forces ready for a possible conflict with China for Taiwan?

The real tragedy for the United States is not the resounding defeat in Afghanistan, but the fact that it took place on live television. When they withdrew from Vietnam, internal consensus was shattered by anti-war protests. When Martin Luther King made a link between capitalism, racism and imperialism and spoke out against the Vietnam War, he was disparaged. Mohammad Ali, who refused to enlist, was stripped of his boxer titles and threatened with arrest. While the war in Afghanistan has not sparked passionate reactions, many in the Black Lives Matter movement have made these connections.

For centuries the United States has had the opportunity to withdraw into the peace guaranteed by its geography. Lots of land and fresh water, no hostile neighbors, oceans on both sides. And now also a lot of oil thanks to the fracking. But US geography is on the alert. Its natural abundance can no longer sustain theAmerican way of life. Nor the war. The oceans are rising, the coasts are unsafe, the forests are burning, the flames lick the edges of the settled civilization and, spreading, they devour entire cities. Drought is rampant. Hurricanes and floods devastate cities.

If empires and their outposts need to plunder the planet to maintain their hegemony, it doesn’t matter if the plunder is the work of US, European, Chinese or Indian capital. This is not what we should be talking about. While we are busy talking, the Earth dies.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)