A failure of the WEST

On Oc­to­ber 7, 2001, in re­sponse to the Tal­iban regime’s re­fusal to hand over the lead­ers of Al-Qaeda re­spon­si­ble for the 9/11 at­tacks and backed by the UN char­ter, the US mil­i­tary ma­chine was launched, in­vok­ing the prin­ci­ple of self-de­fence. Avi­a­tion de­stroyed tar­gets in Kabul, Al-Qaeda train­ing camps and com­mu­ni­ca­tions cen­tres, with Afghanistan’s out­dated air de­fences im­po­tent to stop it. Mean­while, the North­ern Al­liance oc­cu­pied one after the other of the coun­try’s major cities until on No­vem­ber 13 Kabul fell and on De­cem­ber 7 the Tal­iban fief of Kan­da­har sur­ren­dered. The war lasted two months. The oc­cu­pa­tion was han­dled by the In­ter­na­tional As­sis­tance and Se­cu­rity Force under NATO com­mand, and sup­port from the UK, France, Ger­many, Canada and Aus­tralia in a coali­tion that by 2011 in­cluded 50 coun­tries and over 130,000 sol­diers.

Twenty years on, the last US sol­diers left Afghanistan in an op­er­a­tion com­pa­ra­ble to its de­par­ture from Saigon on April 30, 1975. They left be­hind 17 years of vi­o­lence (the Tal­iban in­sur­gency began in 2004) that has rav­aged the coun­try and caused hun­dreds of thou­sands of deaths, with tens of bil­lions of dol­lars spent. And yet none of the goals of the de­ploy­ment have been achieved: eco­nomic re­con­struc­tion, po­lit­i­cal sta­bil­ity, an in­ter­na­tion­ally recog­nis­able po­lit­i­cal regime, se­cu­rity, an end to opium traf­fick­ing... On the con­trary, Afghanistan, de­stroyed by sec­tar­ian vi­o­lence and war­lords, gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion and the dis­in­ter­est of the in­ter­na­tional com­mu­nity in fi­nanc­ing re­con­struc­tion, is today a failed state that has fallen like ripe fruit into the hands of the Tal­iban.

With the con­quest of Kan­da­har on Au­gust 12 and other major cities in the days that fol­lowed, the Tal­iban quickly con­trolled al­most the en­tire coun­try. On the 15th, they en­tered Kabul and pres­i­dent Ashraf Ghani fled. The Tal­iban of­fen­sive had been going on for a month against an Afghan army that, with­out air cover or US sup­port, fled in dis­ar­ray.

Talks had opened in Doha (Qatar) on Sep­tem­ber 12, 2020 be­tween the Afghan gov­ern­ment and the Tal­iban but it did not stop the fight­ing or the mass de­ser­tions from among gov­ern­ment ranks. Ghani ac­cepted the ne­go­ti­a­tions forced by the deal reached in Feb­ru­ary 2020 in which Don­ald Trump ob­tained vague promises from the Tal­iban to back a last­ing peace, an end to vi­o­lence and progress in re­solv­ing the con­flict through a ne­go­ti­ated po­lit­i­cal agree­ment.

In short, after 20 years a new Tal­iban gov­ern­ment rules in Kabul. It re­mains to be seen whether the Tal­iban will re­frain from ap­ply­ing its dis­torted and spu­ri­ous ver­sion of Islam, with se­ri­ous con­se­quences for the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion and es­pe­cially for women and girls, who are sub­jected to gen­der dis­crim­i­na­tion and ex­cluded from pub­lic spaces, ed­u­ca­tion and work. The con­se­quences of this non-fu­ture after more than four decades of war (the So­vi­ets en­tered the coun­try in 1979), have been felt in the form of 3.3 mil­lion in­ter­nally dis­placed per­sons (400,000 since Jan­u­ary) in ad­di­tion to the 2.6 mil­lion ex­ter­nally dis­placed peo­ple at the end of 2020.

It has again been shown that in mod­ern wars the major mil­i­tary pow­ers win the con­ven­tional phase of the con­flict only to lose the oc­cu­pa­tion that fol­lows. The vic­tims are al­ways the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion, while, in an un­wor­thy ges­ture, some Eu­ro­pean politi­cians from Bel­gium, Den­mark, Greece and Aus­tria call for the repa­tri­a­tion of Afghan asy­lum seek­ers (570,000 since 2015) to pre­vent an avalanche of refugees like the one pro­voked by the war in Syria. In con­trast, in a ges­ture that ho­n­ours him, Pere Aragonès has of­fered Cat­alo­nia as a host coun­try.