This week, as you likely know, President Biden announced the planned withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, with the last ones leaving sometime before September 11, 2021. Mind you, that is not the anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan, but rather the 20th anniversary of the attacks that we used as a justification to invade Afghanistan (not to mention the 48th anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende, President of Chile, and the installment of the dictator Augusto Pinochet – another triumph of American foreign policy). As that date is a significant one in the annals of imperialism, I suppose it’s fitting that we should choose it to mark the end our occupation of Afghanistan, assuming we actually go through with it this time. Let us not forget that Trump agreed to pull out by May of this year, and that the Biden team backed away from that. So … we’ll see.

I (and I’m sure, you as well) have heard many, many voices over the past few days warning of the dark consequences that may result from this decision, as qualified and attenuated as it may turn out to be. (For instance, will contractors be removed? Will overflights and drone sorties continue?) There is a cadre of politicians – mostly those who coalesced around John McCain back in the day – who suggest that our best way forward would be to stay in that country permanently. They point to Germany, Japan, and Korea as examples of what positive effects such an endless presence may have. It’s no accident that the chief proponents of this “strategy” tend to be either veterans or people with strong military connections, because they claim some standing on the issue. It’s just that these are all really bad examples. While there’s been a standoff of sorts in Korea for 70 years, we haven’t been engaged in combat in Germany or Japan or, really, Korea the whole time our military has been ensconced in those countries. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has been an active war zone for forty years and more.

Just to be clear – I’m not saying we should wash our hands of Afghanistan altogether. God, no. We owe the Afghans big-time. We owe them for stoking the Mujahideen rebellion in the seventies, years before the Soviet invasion, a policy that led to a grinding war of attrition through the 80s and into the 90s. We owe them for having funded and facilitated that long war, helping the Saudis bankroll the rise of the precursors of the Taliban and Al Qaida, which is a curse that the Afghans suffered from far more than we have . We owe them for attacking their country in 2001, throwing them into another two decades of war, making common cause with their most rapacious warlords, and costing them another 150,000 lives. We owe them for dropping a lot of bank on some of the most corrupt elements in the country, further entrenching oligarchic power and further distorting their society with corruption and neocolonialism.

Suffice to say, it’s time we left Afghanistan for good. And then maybe make an extra effort to help them overcome the problems that we played a key role in causing.

luv u,

jp