U.S. Afghan Exit: “May history never forget this cowardice”

The United States has completed its hasty military withdrawal from Afghanistan after the last of its planes took off from Kabul airport, marking a historic day in the country’s history.

All U.S. service members have now departed, bringing an end to a 20-year military occupation that claimed the lives of more than 2,400 American  troops and hundreds of thousands of Afghans. The financial loss for the U.S. taxpayers has been at least $2 trillion, although experts say this is a conservative figure and does not include others aspects, such as future costs for injured veterans. 

During a news conference at the Pentagon headquarters, the head of U.S. Central Command, General Kenneth McKenzie, announced the "completion of our withdrawal" He said the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Ross Wilson, was onboard the final flight from Kabul.

McKenzie said, "the last C-17 lifted off on 30 August at 3.29pm (EDT) and the last manned aircraft is clearing the airspace above Afghanistan now". 

He noted that since August 14th, the U.S. and its allies had evacuated 123,000 people, following the Taliban's swift takeover.

“The withdrawal signifies both the end of the military component of the evacuation, but also the end of the nearly 20-year mission that began in Afghanistan shortly after September 11, 2001,” he said. 

“The cost was 2,461 U.S. service members and civilians killed and more than 20,000 who were injured. Sadly, that includes 13 U.S. service members who were killed last week”.

In another sign of the desperate evacuation process, McKenzie admitted U.S. forces destroyed, at the last moment, 73 American aircraft at Kabul airport as well as scores of armored vehicles and a high-tech rocket defense system. 

Taliban spokesman Qari Yusuf confirmed "the last U.S. soldier has left Kabul airport and our country gained complete independence"

It’s the first time in almost 20 years that no foreign soldiers have any presence on Afghanistan’s soil. 

Following the departure announcement of U.S.-led foreign forces; celebratory gunfire erupted across the capital. Fireworks also lit up the sky above Kabul as the Taliban celebrated. 

Media reports describe “the closing hours of the evacuation were marked by extraordinary drama, American troops faced the daunting task of getting final evacuees onto planes while also getting themselves and some of their equipment out”

Following the withdrawal, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement "now, our 20-year military presence in Afghanistan has ended", that the world would hold the Taliban to their commitment to allow safe passage for those to want to leave Afghanistan. 

Biden added that “it was the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs and of all of our commanders on the ground to end our airlift mission as planned. Their view was that ending our military mission was the best way to protect the lives of our troops”.

During a briefing, U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, announced Washington has suspended its diplomatic presence in Kabul and transferred its operations to Doha, Qatar. He says "given the uncertain security environment and political situation in Afghanistan, it was the prudent step to take" 

Highlighting the path ahead for Washington; Blinken claims that the U.S. will “maintain robust counterterrorism capabilities in the region”.

He noted the U.S. will engage with the Taliban but not rely on them, saying “going forward any engagement with the Taliban will be driven by one thing only: our national interests”. He added “every step we take will be based not on what a Taliban government says but by its actions”

However, the remarks have not gone down well on Capitol Hill; many in Congress are furious at the White House. Among the damning assessments by U.S. Senators was one by Senator Ben Sasse, who said: 

“This national disgrace is the direct result of President Biden’s cowardice and incompetence. The President made the decision to trust the Taliban. The President made the decision to set an arbitrary August 31st deadline. The President made the decision to abandon Bagram Air Base. The President made the decision not to expand the perimeter around Karzai International Airport. The President made the decision to undermine our NATO allies”.

Senator Sasse goes on to say “The President made the decision to break our word to our Afghan partners. The President made the decision to tell one lie after another as the crisis unfolded. The President made the morally indefensible decision to leave Americans behind. Dishonor was the President’s choice. May history never forget this cowardice”. 

Other congress members have said the embarrassing withdrawal for Washington is a culmination of the measures taken by four consecutive U.S. administrations that presided over the two-decade occupation. 

Elsewhere, it has been revealed that the Pentagon was prepared for a mass casualty event hours before Thursday’s bomb attack at Afghanistan’s Kabul airport.

According to detailed notes of classified calls provided to U.S. news site, Politico, the Pentagon was aware of an imminent attack at Kabul Airport hours before the explosion killed nearly 200 people including 13 American troops.

The news site says top Pentagon officials held a meeting, discussed the options and decided to keep the so-called Abbey Gate section of the International airport open longer so that evacuations could continue. 

A second defense official says the intelligence about the security threat at Kabul airport detailed on the calls was relayed up and down the chain of command.

The Pentagon has strongly condemned the release of the information.

Spokesperson, John Kirby, told the news website “this story is based on the unlawful disclosure of classified information and internal deliberations of a sensitive nature”. 

Kirby added “as soon as we became aware of the material divulged to the reporter, we engaged Politico at the highest levels to prevent the publication of information”

The Pentagon also says “we condemn the unlawful disclosure of classified information and oppose the publication of a story based on it while a dangerous operation is ongoing”.

The White House refused to comment further, but the information could be explosive for the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden. 

Meanwhile, U.S. led Western powers have been forced to accept the reality of the Taliban’s control as they backed a watered down UN resolution that says it “expects” the Taliban to honor a commitment to allow Afghans to leave the country and “requests” that Kabul airport be securely reopened, but falls short of demanding a UN-sponsored safe zone in the Afghan capital.

The UNSC resolution indicates no specific reprisal if Afghanistan is sealed off following the 31 August deadline for the final U.S. withdrawal that ends its battle to crush the Taliban.

The draft from the 15-strong council, co-written by the U.S., UK and France, simply notes a “statement of 27 August, 2021, in which the Taliban committed that Afghans will be able to travel abroad” and “expects that the Taliban will adhere to these and all other commitments”.

The text also “calls on the relevant parties to work with international partners to take steps to strengthen security and to prevent further casualties, and requests that every effort be made to allow for the rapid and secure reopening of Kabul airport and its surrounding area”.

The text in effect leaves the security of the airport to the Taliban. However it remains unclear if and when the Taliban can operate the international airport. 

The attempt to keep the Security Council united means no specific consequence is spelt out if the Taliban does not heed the calls in the resolution. 

The final result will be viewed as a setback for France, which at the weekend led calls for a UN safe zone. Britain widely saw the proposal as ineffective without the presence of the UN or other troops.

At the session, China heavily condemned the nations that occupied Afghanistan saying they should learn a lesson from the 20 years disaster. Beijing’s envoy to the UNSC also says Afghans should be left alone to decide their future 

With a new chapter emerging and uncertainty in the air, Taliban spokesman, Suhail Shaheen, gave an indication of what lies ahead in the immediate future by sharing a statement by the group’s political office in Doha, Qatar in which the Taliban calls on employees of all universities in Afghanistan to resume their work from Tuesday.

The statement says both male and female employees should return to work adding the Ministry of Higher Education calls on rectors, deans, professors and administrative staff to report to their jobs on Tuesday. The statement concludes they should "resume their administrative and academic works including making due preparations for starting classes."

The United States led the invasion of Afghanistan in early 2020, with the aim of toppling the Taliban rule. 20 years later, it has fled with the Taliban returning to governance. During those 20 years, Afghan civilians have suffered significantly with their lives. Massive U.S. tax money has gone to waste, money that could have closed the gap on growing inequality in America or going to much needed services back home. 

The U.S. military industrial complex made a nice profit and can be considered the only winners of this catastrophic military adventure; the longest in America’s history. In terms of the war itself, it has been a humiliating defeat for Washington and its Western allies. 

The abandonment of former President Ashraf Ghani amid the swift Taliban takeover of the country and the capital Kabul, is a message to other nations in West Asia. 

Those who rely on Washington for security will be alarmed as to how a government and its forces collapsed so quickly after two decades of American investment in resources and troops, and how Washington was unable or unwilling to anticipate the collapse.

At the same time, the chairman of the Supreme Revolutionary Committee of Yemen says Saudi Arabia and its U.S. backed ally should take a lesson from Afghanistan and devise a plan to end the nearly seven year war. 

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi says “the Yemeni nation will never accept occupation and guardianship, no matter how long the conflicts and confrontations last”.

He adds “Yemen will be the graveyard of the aggressors”.

TAGS

• Afghanistan
 
• U.S.
 
• Kabul Airport

Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Kazakhstan to hold joint drill in Caspian Sea

TEHRAN - Admiral Sergei Ekimov, Deputy Commander of the Russian Caspian Fleet, said on Tuesday that Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Republic of Azerbaijan will hold a joint naval exercise in the Caspian Sea.

The top Russian military official said warships from the mentioned countries will hold the joint naval exercise in early September after the end of the Sea Cup competition, IRNA reported, quoting RIA Novosti. 

Ekimov added, "During a few days, we will practice joint actions in the Caspian Sea." 

The Russian military official has previously said that the Caspian Sea is a sea of peace and friendship, and that all the Caspian littoral states are committed to this significant issue and "we are trying to pass it on to the next generations."

Admiral Ekimov expressed satisfaction regarding arrangements made by Iran’s Navy's Northern Fleet to host the Sea Cup competitions, saying, "The Sea Cup competitions are held every year better than the previous round, and this year, with the decision of the Russian Ministry of Defense, it was decided to hold this competition with Iran as the host."

The sixth round of the International Sea Cup competitions started with the participation of about 400 military personnel from Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Iran on August 25 in Anzali port.

Joshan and Peykan missile launchers from Iran; Mangistav and Sari Arka ships from Kazakhstan; Makhach Qala and Astrakhan, and 738 SB from the Caspian Sea fleet of Russia; and G-122 and G-124" warships from the Republic of Azerbaijan will take part in the Sea Cup competition, which will be held within the framework of the Armia-2021 International Military Competition. 

The competitions will run until the September 4th.

TAGS

• Iran
 
• Russia
 
• China
 
• Kazakhstan
 
• military power
 
• military drills
 
• Iranian Navy

A moment for regional cooperation on Afghanistan

TEHRAN – After two decades of war and destruction, the United States announced the end of its military mission in Afghanistan, leaving the country stateless and chaotic. With the U.S. gone, neighbors of Afghanistan find themselves in a situation that could spiral out of control if they sit back.

On Monday midnight, the last U.S. service member boarded a military plane to leave the untidy and messy airport of Kabul, creating a historic moment that could go down in history as the day when the U.S. surrendered to an enemy it failed to defeat for two decades. 

When the U.S. attacked Kabul, the Taliban was in power and when it fled Kabul two decades later the Taliban was still in power. So, what the U.S. has achieved during this war other than death and destruction? Nothing. Of course, the U.S. is not going to live with the consequences of its Afghan fiasco. Afghanistan’s immediate neighbors will have to bear the brunt of U.S. adventurism. 

In recent weeks, thousands of Afghans fled their country after the Taliban took over Kabul. Many of them tried to enter Iran. Others escaped to Pakistan. In addition to the influx of refugees, Afghanistan’s neighbors face growing dangers of insecurity in a country where the state historically had no deep clout over society.

These fears have also led some Afghans to seek help from neighboring countries. These Afghans believe that neighbors such as Iran and Pakistan are in a position to act in harmony to help Afghans form an inclusive government that would have to tackle challenges and meet the needs of Afghans from all walks of life. 

Mohammad Esmail Qassem Yar, a former head of Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga in the period after the Bonn conference, has underlined the need for convergence among Afghanistan’s neighbors. “Certainly, our neighbors, especially Iran and Pakistan, can play an effective role in maintaining peace and stability in Afghanistan through cooperation and convergence. Otherwise, the consequences of Afghanistan's problems on its neighbors are certain,” Qassem Yar told Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations (SCFR). 

He assessed the history of Iran-Pakistan positions in helping to solve Afghanistan's problems and efforts for convergence as constructive and positive, adding that “Fortunately, the Taliban have emphasized so far that they are not the Taliban of yesterday, they are paying attention to the needs of the time, they are thinking about the future, they want the country to develop and the people to enjoy prosperity. Therefore, with such a view, it seems that Afghanistan's neighboring countries will have more opportunities to establish constructive channels of negotiations and continue dialogue.”

The government formation process would serve as a litmus test of whether the Taliban have changed for the better. The formation of an inclusive government will put the group’s claims of change to a real test. 

“Certainly, the real manifestation of the change in the Taliban's approach will be the formation of a pluralistic and inclusive government in Afghanistan with the presence of all influential and interested parties in the country. We got such a promise in Doha and both sides have agreed to form a joint government,” the former Afghan leader added. 

Iran and Pakistan have already reiterated that the Taliban should refrain from marginalizing other ethnoreligious groups and form an inclusive government. On Tuesday, as the Taliban celebrated the end of U.S. occupation, Iran once again underlined the need for an inclusive government in Kabul. 

“20 years of U.S. occupation brought Afghanistan nothing but death & destruction. It's now a historic opportunity for Afghan leaders to put an end to their people's plight by ending violence & forming an inclusive government. Iran stands with the brotherly nation of #Afghanistan,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Twitter. 

Whether the Taliban would include other Afghan groups in the new government remains to be seen. But any effort to exclude others on the part of the Taliban would alienate neighboring countries as most of them have ethnoreligious extensions into Afghanistan. 

Afghanistan, Qassem Yar said, needs to have close cooperation with its neighbors. “We share a common destiny with our neighbors, and cooperation and attention to peace and stability in the region are essential in this regard. Of course, Russia and China have stated that they do not intend to intervene or mediate, but these two countries certainly have an important role to play in the region, and if they take positive action in cooperation with countries such as Iran, India and Pakistan, they will be welcomed,” he noted. 

TAGS

• Afghanistan
 
• Taliban
 
• U.S.
 
• Iran
 
• Kabul Airport

Back to the future: Talibanistan, Year 2000

 by Pepe Escobar for The Saker Blog and friends

Dear reader: this is very special, a trip down memory lane like no other: back to prehistoric times – the pre-9/11, pre-YouTube, pre-social network world.

Welcome to Taliban Afghanistan – Talibanistan – in the Year 2000. This is when photographer Jason Florio and myself slowly crossed it overland from east to west, from the Pakistani border at Torkham to the Iranian border at Islam qillah. As Afghan ONG workers acknowledged, we were the first Westerners to pull this off in years.

Fatima, Maliha and Nouria, at home in Kabul

Those were the days. Bill Clinton was enjoying his last stretch at the White House. Osama bin Laden was a discreet guest of Mullah Omar – hitting the front pages only occasionally. There was no hint of 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the “war on terror”, the perpetual financial crisis, the Russia-China strategic partnership. Globalization ruled, and the US was the undisputed global top dog. The Clinton administration and the Taliban were deep into Pipelineistan territory – arguing over the tortuous, proposed Trans-Afghan gas pipeline.

We tried everything, but we couldn’t even get a glimpse of Mullah Omar. Osama bin Laden was also nowhere to be seen. But we did experience Talibanistan in action, in close detail.

Today is a special day to revisit it. The Forever War in Afghanistan is over; from now on it will be a Hybrid mongrel, against the integration of Afghanistan into the New Silk Roads and Greater Eurasia.

In 2000 I wrote a Talibanistan road trip special for a Japanese political magazine, now extinct, and ten years later a 3-part mini-series revisiting it for Asia Times.

Part 2 of this series can be found here, and part 3 here.

Yet this particular essay – part 1 – had completely disappeared from the internet (that’s a long story): I found it recently, by accident, in a hard drive. The images come from the footage I shot at the time with a Sony mini-DV: I just received the file today from Paris.

This is a glimpse of a long-lost world; call it a historical register from a time when no one would even dream of a “Saigon moment” remixed – as a rebranded umbrella of warriors conveniently labeled “Taliban”, after biding their time, Pashtun-style, for two decades, praises Allah for eventually handing them victory over yet another foreign invader.

Now let’s hit the road.

KABUL, GHAZNI – Fatima, Maliha and Nouria, who I used to call The Three Graces, must be by now 40, 39 and 35 years old, respectively. In the year 2000 they lived in an empty, bombed house next to a bullet-ridden mosque in a half-destroyed, apocalyptic theme park Kabul – by then the world capital of the discarded container (or reconstituted by a missile and reconverted into a shop); a city where 70% of the population were refugees, legions of homeless kids carried bags of cash on their backs ($1 was worth more than 60,000 Afghanis) and sheep outnumbered rattling 1960s Mercedes buses.

Under the merciless Taliban theocracy, the Three Graces suffered triple discrimination – as women, Hazaras and Shi’ites. They lived in Kardechar, a neighborhood totally destroyed in the 1990s by the war between Commander Masoud, The Lion of the Panjshir, and the Hazaras (the descendants of mixed marriages between Genghis Khan’s Mongol warriors and Turkish and Tajik peoples) before the Taliban took power in 1996. The Hazaras were always the weakest link in the Tajik-Uzbek-Hazara alliance – supported by Iran, Russia and China – confronting the Taliban.

Every dejected Kabuli intellectual I had met invariably defined the Taliban as “an occupation force of religious fanatics” – their rural medievalism totally absurd for urban Tajiks, used to a tolerant form of Islam. According to a university professor, “their jihad is not against kafirs; it’s against other Muslims who follow Islam”.

I spent a long time talking to the Dari-speaking Three Graces inside their bombed-out home – with translation provided by their brother Aloyuz, who had spent a few years in Iran supporting the family long-distance. This simple fact in itself would assure that if caught, we would all be shot dead by the Taliban V & V – the notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Taliban religious police.

This is how bombed-out Kabul looked like in 2000

The Three Graces’ dream was to live “free, not under pressure”. They had never been to a restaurant, a bar or a cinema. Fatima liked “rock” music, which in her case meant Afghan singer Natasha. She said she “liked” the Taliban, but most of all she wanted to get back to school. They never mentioned any discrimination between Sunnis and Shi’ites; they actually wanted to leave for Pakistan.

Their definition of “human rights” included priority for education, the right to work, and to get a job in the state sector; Fatima and Maliha wanted to be doctors. Perhaps they are, today, in Hazara land; 21 years ago they spent their days weaving beautiful silk shawls.

Education was terminally forbidden for girls over 12. The literacy rate among women was only 4%. Outside the Three Graces’ house, almost every woman was a “widow of war”, enveloped in dusty light blue burqas, begging to support their children. Not only this was an unbearable humiliation in the context of an ultra-rigid Islamic society, it contradicted the Taliban obsession of preserving the “honor and purity” of their women.

Kabul’s population was then 2 million; less than 10%, concentrated in the periphery, supported the Taliban. True Kabulis regarded them as barbarians. For the Taliban, Kabul was more remote than Mars. Every day at sunset the Intercontinental Hotel, by then an archeological ruin, received an inevitable Taliban sightseeing group. They’d come to ride the lift (the only one in town) and walk around the empty swimming pool and tennis court. They’d be taking a break from cruising around town in their fleet of imported-from-Dubai Toyota Hi-Lux, complete with Islamic homilies painted in the windows, Kalashnikovs on show and little whips on hand to impose on the infidels the appropriate, Islamically correct, behavior. But at least the Three Graces were safe; they never left their bombed-out shelter.

Doubt is sin, debate is heresy

Few things were more thrilling in Talibanistan 21 years ago than to alight at Pul-e-Khisshti – the fabled Blue Mosque, the largest in Afghanistan – on a Friday afternoon after Jumma prayers and confront the One Thousand and One Nights assembled cast. Any image of this apotheosis of thousands of black or white-turbaned rustic warriors, kohl in their eyes and the requisite macho-sexy stare, would be all the rage on the cover of Uomo Vogue. To even think of taking a photo was anathema; the entrance to the mosque was always swarming with V & V informants.

Finally, in one of those eventful Friday afternoons, I managed to be introduced into the Holy Grail – the secluded quarters of maulvi (priest) Noor Muhamad Qureishi, by then the Taliban Prophet in Kabul. He had never exchanged views with a Westerner. It was certainly one of the most surrealist interviews of my life.

Qureishi, like all Taliban religious leaders, was educated in a Pakistani madrassa. At first, he was your typical hardcore deobandi; the deobandis, as the West would later find out, were an initially progressive movement born in India in the mid-19th century to revive Islamic values vis-à-vis the sprawling British Empire. But they soon derailed into megalomania, discrimination against women and Shi’ite-hatred.

Most of all, Quereishi was the quintessential product of a boom – the connection between the ISI and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) party during the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad, when thousands of madrassas were built in Pakistan’s Pashtun belt. Afghan refugees had the right to free education, a roof over their heads, three meals a day and military training. Their “educators” were semi-illiterate maulvis who had never known the reformist agenda of the original deobandi movement.

On the Afghanistan-Iran border at Islam qilla

Reclined on a tattered cushion over one of the mosque’s ragged carpets, Qureishi laid down the deobandi law in Pashto for hours. Among other things he said the movement was “the most popular” because its ideologues dreamed that Prophet Muhammad ordered them to build a madrassa in Deoband, India. So this was Islam’s purest form “because it came directly from Muhammad”. Despite the formidable catalogue of Taliban atrocities, he insisted on their “purity”.

Qureishi dabbled on the inferiority of Hindus because of their sacred cows (“why not dogs, at least they are faithful to their owners”). As for Buddhism, it was positively depraved (“Buddha is an idol”). He would have had a multiple heart attack with Thailand’s Buddhist go-go girls, dancing topless at night and offering incense at the temple the morning after.

Doubt is sin. Debate is heresy. “The only true knowledge is the Koran”. He insisted that all “forms of modern scientific knowledge came from the Koran”. As an example, he quoted – what else – a Koranic verse (the Koran, by the way, in its neo-deobandi, Talibanized version, forbade women to write, and allowed education only up to 10 years old). I could not help being reminded of that 18th century French anonymous – a typical product of the Enlightenment – who had written the Treaty of the Three Impostors – Moses, Jesus and Muhammad; but if I tried to insert the European Enlightenment into (his) monologue I would probably be shot dead. Basically, Qureishi finally managed to convince me that all this religious shadow play was about proving that “my sect is purer than yours”.

Village elders in Herat

Play it again, infidel

Talibanistan lived under a strict Kalashnikov culture. But the supreme anti-Taliban lethal weapon was not a gun, or even a mortar or RPG. It was a camera. I knew inevitably that day would come, and it came on Kabul stadium, built by the former USSR to extol proletarian internationalism; another Friday, at 5 pm, the weekly soccer hour – the only form of entertainment absent from the Taliban’s Index Prohibitorum apart from public executions and mango ice cream.

Jason and me were lodged at the VIP tribune – less than 10 US cents for the ticket. The stadium was packed – but silent as a mosque. Two teams, the red and the blue, were playing the Islamically correct way – with extra skirts under their trunks. At half time the whole stadium – to the sound of “Allah Akbar” – run to pray by the pitch; those who didn’t were spanked or thrown in jail.

Jason had his cameras hanging from his neck but he was not using them. Yet that was more than enough for a hysteric V & V teenage informant. We are escorted out of the stands by a small army of smiling, homoerotic brotherhood, those who were then referred to as “soldiers of Allah”. Finally we are presented to a white-turbaned Talib with assassin’s eyes; he’s no one other than mullah Salimi, the vice-Minister of the religious police in Kabul – the reincarnation of The Great Inquisitor. We are finally escorted out of the stadium and thrown into a Hi-Lux, destination unknown. Suddenly we are more popular with the crowd than the soccer match itself.

At a Taliban “office” – a towel on the grass in front of a bombed-out building, decorated with a mute sat-phone – we are charged with espionage. Our backpacks are thoroughly searched. Salimi inspects two rolls of film from Jason’s cameras; no incriminating photo. It’s now the turn of my Sony mini-DV camera. We press “play”; Salimi recoils in horror. We explain nothing is recorded on the blue screen. What was really recorded – he just needed to press “rewind” – would be enough to send us to the gallows, including a lot of stuff with the Three Graces. Once again we noticed the Taliban badly needed not only art directors and PR agents but also info-tech whiz kids.

Carpet-weaving at the Herat bazaar

In Taliban anti-iconography, video, in theory, might be allowed, because the screen is a mirror. Anyway, later we would know from the lion’s mouth, that is, the Ministry of Information and Culture in Kandahar: TV and video would remain perpetually banned.

At that time, a few photo-studios survived near one of the Kabul bazaars – only churning out 3X4 photos for documents. The owners paid their bills renting their Xerox machines. The Zahir Photo Studio still had on its walls a collection of black and white and sepia photos of Kabul, Herat, minarets, nomads and caravans. Among Leicas, superb Speed Graphic 8 X 10 and dusty Russian panoramic cameras, Mr. Zahir would lament, “photography is dead in Afghanistan”. At least, that wouldn’t be for long.

The 11th century Ghazni minaret with, on the foreground, a Taliban military base

So after an interminable debate in Pashto with some Urdu and English thrown in, we are “liberated”. Some Taliban – but certainly not Salimi, still piercing us with his assassin’s eyes – try a formal apology, saying this is incompatible with the Pashtun code of hospitality. All tribal Pashtun – like the Taliban – follow the pashtunwali, the rigid code that emphasizes, among other things, hospitality, vengeance and a pious Islamic life. According to the code, it’s a council of elders that arbitrates specific disputes, applying a compendium of laws and punishments. Most cases involve murders, land disputes and trouble with women. For the Pashtun, the line between pashtunwali and Sharia was always fuzzy.

A Kuchi nomad caravan going south towards Kandahar.

The V & V obviously was not a creation of Mullah Omar, the “Leader of the Faithful”; it was based on a Saudi Arabian original. In its heyday, in the second half of the 1990s, the V & V was a formidable intelligence agency – with informers infiltrated in the Army, ministries, hospitals, UN agencies, NGOs – evoking a bizarre memory of KHAD, the enormous intel agency of the 1980’s communist regime, during the anti-USSR jihad. The difference is that the V & V only answered to orders – issued on bits and pieces of paper – of Mullah Omar himself.

Rock the base

The verdict echoed like a dagger piercing the oppressive air of the desert near Ghazni. A 360-degree panoramic shot revealed a background of mountains where the mineral had expelled all the vegetal; the silhouette of two 11th century minarets; and a foreground of tanks, helicopters and rocket launchers. The verdict, issued in Pashto and mumbled by our scared official translator imposed by Kabul, was inexorable: “You will be denounced in a military court. The investigation will be long, six months; meanwhile you will await the decision in jail”.

Once again, we were being charged with espionage, but now this was the real deal. We could be executed with a shot on the back of the neck – Khmer Rouge style. Or stoned. Or thrown into a shallow grave and buried alive by a brick wall smashed by a tractor. Brilliant Taliban methods for the final solution were myriad. And to think this was all happening because of two minarets.

To walk over a supposedly mined field trying to reach two minarets was not exactly a brilliant idea in the first place. Red Army experts, during the 1980s, buried 12 million mines in Afghanistan. They diversified like crazy; more than 50 models, from Zimbabwe’s RAP-2s to Belgium’s NR-127s. UN officials had assured us that more than half the country was mined. Afghan officials at the Mine Detention Center in Herat, with their 50 highly trained German shepherds, would later tell us that it would take 22,000 years to demine the whole country.

My objects of desire in Ghazni were two “Towers of Victory”; two circular superstructures, isolated in the middle of the desert and built by the Sassanians as minarets – commemorative, not religious; there was never a mosque in the surroundings. In the mid-19th century scholars attributed the grand minaret to Mahmud, protector of Avicenna and the great Persian poet Ferdowsi. Today it is known that the small minaret dates from 1030, and the big one, from 1099. They are like two brick rockets pointing to the sheltering sky and claiming for the attention of those travelling the by then horrific Kabul-Kandahar highway, a Via Dolorosa of multinational flat tires – Russian, Chinese, Iranian.

The problem is that, 21 years ago, right adjacent to the minarets, there was an invisible Taliban military base. At first we could see only an enormous weapons depot. We asked a sentinel to take a few pictures; he agreed. Walking around the depot – between carcasses of Russian tanks and armored cars – we found some functioning artillery pieces. And a lone, white Taliban flag. And not a living soul. This did look like an abandoned depot. But then we hit on a destroyed Russian helicopter – a prodigy of conceptual art. Too late: soon we are intercepted by a Taliban out of nowhere.

The commander of the base wanted to know “under which law” we assumed we had the right to take photos. He wanted to know which was the punishment, “in our country”, for such an act. When the going was really getting tough, everything turned Monty Python. One of the Taliban had walked back to the road to fetch our driver, Fateh. They came back two hours later. The commander talked to Fateh in Pashto. And then we were “liberated”, out of “respect for Fateh’s white beard”. But we should “confess” to our crime – which we did right away, over and over again.

The fact of the matter is that we were freed because I was carrying a precious letter hand-signed by the all-powerful Samiul Haq, the leader of Haqqania, the factory-cum-academy, Harvard and M.I.T. of Taliban in Akhora Khatak, on the Grand Trunk Road between Islamabad and Peshawar in Pakistan. Legions of Taliban ministers, province governors, military commanders, judges and bureaucrats had studied in Haqqania.

Haqqania was founded in 1947 by deobandi religious scholar Abdul Haq, the father of maulvi and former senator Samiul Haq, a wily old hand fond of brothels and as engaging as a carpet vendor in the Peshawar bazaars. He was a key educator of the first detribalized, urbanized and literate Afghan generation; “literate”, of course, in Haqqania-branded, Deobandi-style Islam. In Haqqania – where I saw hundreds of students from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan indoctrinated to later export Talibanization to Central Asia – debate was heresy, the master was infallible and Samiul Haq was almost as perfect as Allah.

He had told me – no metaphor intended – that “Allah had chosen Mullah Omar to be the leader of the Taliban”. And he was sure that when the Islamic Revolution reached Pakistan, “it will be led by a unknown rising from the masses” – like Mullah Omar. At the time Haq was Omar’s consultant on international relations and Sharia-based decisions. He bundled up both Russia and the US as “enemies of our time”; blamed the US for the Afghan tragedy; but otherwise offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to the US if Bill Clinton guaranteed no interference in Afghan affairs.

Turn left for the Ministry of Foreign Relations – at the time only recognized by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE

Back in Ghazni, the Taliban commander even invited us for some green tea. Thanks but no thanks. We thanked Allah’s mercy by visiting the tomb of sultan Mahmud in Razah, less than one kilometer from the towers. The tomb is a work of art – translucid marble engraved with Kufic lettering. Islamic Kufic lettering, if observed as pure design, reveals itself as a transposition of the verb, from the audible to the visible. So the conclusion was inevitable; the Taliban had managed to totally ignore the history of their own land, building a military base over two architectural relics and incapable of recognizing even the design of their own Islamic lettering as a form of art.

At the End of This Catastrophic War, We Need to Face the Truth

The U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan should force a reckoning with a long history of military intervention.

DAVID BACON

Foreign Policy In Focus

Congresswoman Barbara Lee speaks at a rally against a potential war with Iran in Washington DC, on January 9, 2020. (Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Many in the U.S. media continue to credit the good intentions of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while belaboring its failure over 20 years to achieve any of them. But to say that the United States wanted a progressive, liberal democratic, and secular government in Afghanistan can only be believed by those who refuse to remember what Washington did when Kabul actually had one.

In the days following the attacks on September 11, the United States was called on to declare war against an enemy those in Congress who voted for it couldn't even name. Policymakers asked American citizens to sacrifice civil liberties for security and give the military money that was so desperately needed to solve the country's social problems.

 Congress did those things with only one dissenting vote: Barbara Lee's. Now it's time to look at historical truth, to understand how the United States got this 20-year war, with its ignominious end at the Kabul airport, and how the overarching framework of U.S. policy was responsible for creating it.

Other countries facing similar traumatic changes wrenching them from the past have pioneered a way to examine their own history. El Salvador, Guatemala, South Africa, and elsewhere established truth commissions to probe into and acknowledge each country's real history.  Such public acknowledgement is a necessary step towards change.

The United States is no stranger to this process. After the end of the Vietnam War (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it), Senator Frank Church held watershed hearings that brought some of the Cold War's ghosts to public attention. But the process was cut short, the policies responsible for Cold War atrocities never fully questioned, and as a result, the ghosts were never laid to rest. Those ghosts still haunt the United States, and in Afghanistan hundreds of thousands died for them.

The massive social upheaval at home following the Vietnam War— and the deaths of over a million Vietnamese and 40,000 US soldiers—forced Senator Church's examination. Before the people of this and other countries pay a similar price in yet another war, the United States need to reexamine that history.

The roots of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington lie in the Cold War.  Without truly ending it and untangling its consequences, there will be no security for us.

The groups accused of responsibility for the attacks of September, which set off the most recent Afghan war, have roots in the forces assembled in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. That much, at least, has become openly discussed. But why did Washington seek to bring these forces together, including Osama bin Laden, then an upper-class Saudi youth?

In the 1970s, a moderately reformist government came to power in Afghanistan, a leftwing populist movement seeking to democratize Afghan society. It mounted literacy campaigns and built schools and clinics in rural areas. It sought to end restrictions on women in education and employment, and discouraged the use of the purdah, a practice that separated men from women and veiled the latter. It talked, although often little more than that, about land reform.

That was enough to earn it the enmity of traditional elements of Afghan society, which began organizing armed attacks on government officials, literacy workers, and people associated with the values the government promoted. Perhaps in another era, Afghans themselves might have resolved those internal conflicts. The forces of right-wing religious extremism might not have come out the better for it.

But Afghanistan's common border and friendly relationship with the Soviet Union made it an attractive target for Cold War destabilization. British and U.S. intelligence agencies funneled money through the Pakistani intelligence service to groups opposing the government. When real civil conflict broke out, the Afghan government appealed for Soviet military help, and the war was on.

From that point forward, the United States spent more money building training camps for the fundamentalist forces and supplying them guns and missiles than it spent in the contra war in Nicaragua and the counterinsurgency in El Salvador combined. U.S. intelligence services dreamed of extending that war into Soviet Central Asia itself. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the conflict did in fact spread north.

Those who wanted a secular Afghanistan, social progress, and justice for its citizens were murdered or driven into exile or silence. Meanwhile, military leaders bent on using Soviet troops to pursue their side of the civil war replaced reformers.

U.S. aid fueled a philosophical movement that combined conservative religious doctrine with nationalism. Having defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan, this movement eventually turned against the United States, as people that U.S. intelligence agencies previously considered "assets" began using weapons originally supplied by the U.S. government. This effort was fueled by the huge U.S. military presence in the Mideast and the oil interests it protects, its support for Israel, and the sanctions and subsequent war against Iraq.

What questions, then, would a truth commission ask, arising from the current tragedy of Afghanistan?

Was a policy bent on destabilizing the Soviet Union sufficient justification for the U.S. decision to support a war against a government that shared more professed U.S. values than the mujahideen that Washington financed? Will the national security advisors who made that decision now answer for its consequences?

In a supposedly post-Cold War world, the military interventions that characterized Cold War policy are far from over. This policy was basically unchanged in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Colombia and elsewhere.

And behind the soldiers and the guns, whose interests are being defended?  Are we supporting those in other countries seeking social equality and social justice, or those fighting against them?

For the countries which have served as battlegrounds, like El Salvador, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan itself, what must be done to repair the damage of those decades and help create stable societies that function for the benefit of the vast majority of their citizens?

The United States could help to rebuild Afghanistan, after having bombed the country back to the stone age (to use the old Cold War idiom). Instead, it is now washing its hands of the situation and leaving. Similarly, Washington could end support for free-market policies that impose poverty on millions of people. But it shows no signs of shifting course. As such, both Democratic and Republican governments are set to continue the Cold War's history of military intervention, with all the destruction and economic inequality that they entail.

DAVID BACON

David Bacon is a writer, photojournalist, and former union organizer. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (2008), Communities Without Borders (2006), and The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border (2004). In his latest project, Living Under the Trees, Bacon is photographing and interviewing indigenous Mexican migrants working in California's fields.