Afghanistan, Israel, and the moral bankruptcy of the Euro-American Empire

 Afghanistan and Israel are not two separate stories but two mirrors: one reflects the impunity of a criminal ally, the other the strangulation of an independent adversary.

Mohamed Lamine KABA

For two decades, the Western world has presented itself as a defender of human rights while betraying blatant hypocrisy. As Abou Ragheb Amani has shown in his article in the Kabul Times, “Global Double Standards: World Powers Protect Israel and Punish Afghanistan,” the United States and the European Union have selectively applied international law, protecting Israel despite its crimes and punishing Afghanistan for its independence. For his part, Ghulam Reza Omidi, in his article in the Kabul Times, “Foreign Models vs. Local Values: Why Western Democracy Failed to Take Root in Afghanistan,” demonstrates the failure of an imposed democracy, alien to local realities. It is in this logic that the 80th UN General Assembly has been reduced to a hollow performance, in which Washington, a deposed but still self-proclaimed judge, shamelessly tramples on international law, which it holds up as a showcase, while France, champion of hypocrisy, preaches the two-state solution while supplying Israel with weapons. Through a diachronic and sociometric analysis, this article highlights, on the one hand, the cynicism of the double standard practiced by the West, and on the other, the collapse of the democratic project imposed on Afghanistan.

Israel protected, Afghanistan strangled: a cynical demonstration of Western double standards

The failure in Kabul demonstrates that the West does not export democracy; it exports chaos, dependency, and, ultimately, its own discredit

Recent history highlights a constant: the United States and its European satellites manipulate international law like a fairground puppet, exhibiting it when it suits them and putting it away when it thwarts their interests. The Gaza war illustrates this hypocrisy to a caricatured degree. Since 1948, and even more so since the intensive bombardments of 2008, 2014, 2021, and 2023, Israel has accumulated documented violations of international humanitarian law: massacres of civilians, destruction of vital infrastructure, and use of starvation as a weapon of war. Yet Washington has systematically blocked any binding resolution (the two-state solution) in the Security Council, establishing Tel Aviv as a state above the law.

Conversely, post-2021 Afghanistan, which dared to drive out the American occupier after twenty years of war, is being punished with an economic sadism that would make a medieval executioner blush: frozen assets ($9.5 billion confiscated by the Federal Reserve in 2021), banking sanctions, diplomatic isolation. All this even though Kabul offers dialogue, non-interference, and regional cooperation. In other words, the more a state massacres with American blessing, the more it is protected; the more a people dare to emancipate themselves from Western tutelage, the more they are strangled.

This mechanism is not an accident but a conscious architecture. It reveals that the “universal values” brandished by Biden yesterday and today by Trump, von der Leyen, or Macron are nothing more than advertising slogans to hide a harsh truth: the collective West does not defend the law, but its privileges. In 2025, as in 2001, there is no “international community” in the strict sense, only a political-financial cartel that distributes impunity to its criminal allies and misery to its independent adversaries.

The failure of imposed democracy: when Kabul ridicules Washington

Afghanistan is also the autopsy of the Western myth: that of a democracy exportable by cruise missiles and NGOs funded by the State Department. Between 2001 and 2021, the United States and NATO swallowed up more than $2 trillion, mobilized up to 140,000 troops in 2011, lost more than 3,500 military personnel (including 2,448 Americans), and built a Potemkin state that collapsed in 11 days in August 2021, when the Taliban recaptured Kabul. Ashraf Ghani fled with suitcases of cash, a grotesque image that will remain in the annals of imperial humiliation.

This collapse is not just military; it is civilizational. Western social engineering—the imposition of liberal values, a constitution copied from Washington, showcase elections—has shattered against the Afghan reality: a conservative, Islamic society, fiercely attached to its historical autonomy. The Americans believed that a people who had defeated the British (1842, 1880, 1919) would bow to their fantasies of “nation-building.” As a result, the Islamic Emirate has returned stronger, while “American-made democracy” has become the greatest ideological fiasco of the 21st century.

It is precisely at the moment when Washington and Brussels claim to be defending democracy in Ukraine and elsewhere that their model is collapsing most spectacularly. Afghanistan is a cruel mirror that exposes the West: its rhetoric is hollow, its military power impotent, and its civilizational project illegitimate. The failure in Kabul demonstrates that the West does not export democracy; it exports chaos, dependency, and, ultimately, its own discredit.

Underlying all these demonstrations is evidence that Afghanistan and Israel are together revealing a naked truth: the collective West believes neither in justice nor in democracy. It believes in the balance of power, in the impunity of its allies, and in the crushing of its opponents. But each time Kabul or Gaza survives, it is a slap in the face to the Western myth, further proof that the Global South, by allying itself with Moscow, Beijing, and its own traditions, is already writing the page of the post-Western world.

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University