Lifting the veil from the magnitude of Western hubris

In recent weeks, a lot of time has been spent scrutinising the timing of the US military withdrawal instead of debating who has benefited the most from the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan over the past two decades. Moreover, everywhere you look, there is a strange degree of callousness whenever Afghanistan or the Taliban are discussed.

I can’t help but wonder why the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is the dominant narrative instead of the violence that the Afghans have suffered for decades. Why is the US withdrawal spun as a betrayal, as if the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has been a blessing? The foreign occupation has benefited the people of Afghanistan much less than the Western military-industrial complex. The politicians and their pied pipers in the media and think tanks who were ultimately responsible for the invasion are not being held to account.

The Taliban and America have more than a few things in common. They both lined the pockets of warlords who attacked villages and summarily executed civilians, brushing aside human rights abuses whenever possible. With a few exceptions, those ultimately responsible for torture and extrajudicial killings were largely untouched, if not pushed up through the ranks. Kidnapping, mass arrests, house raids, indefinite detention and targeted killings have been common tools used by both sides, directly or through CIA-backed militias.

In fact, while the Taliban deployed suicide bombers as a stealth weapon, the US wiped out villages and people attending weddings and funerals using drones and air strikes, followed by “poor investigations and infrequent condolence payments”, according to Human Rights Watch. Put simply, both sides in this war killed civilians, often blurring the lines between the civilised and barbaric. And yet the world is saddened by the US departure and appalled at the arrival of the Taliban.

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We are horrified by the toppling of the US-backed Afghan government by the Taliban, but forget that fewer than a million Afghans — 2.5 per cent of the population — voted for Ashraf Ghani, the polarising president who fled the country as the Taliban marched into the capital.

While Western leaders are now busy blaming the previous Afghan administration for promising the impossible, our presidents, chancellors and prime ministers — and military leaders too — need to be held to account for orchestrating the war, the tragic loss of lives and the epic negligence over how taxpayers’ money has been spent.

Granted, Afghan officials, no doubt routinely, pocketed money meant for their troops, sold weapons on the black market and lied about the number of soldiers in their ranks, but we knew that it was a corrupt government and supported it nonetheless. Moreover, it was our leaders who lied repeatedly to us about this unwinnable war. We were told that, “There is no military path to victory for the Taliban” as the Afghan military were “better trained, better equipped and more competent”.

Of course, the Taliban is ruthless and unforgiving in its methods, but it has never lied to western audiences. The rag-tag guerrilla army never claimed that its enemy was losing momentum or that a shrinking threat needed an expanding force to counter it. Furthermore, it never shifted the goalposts from safeguarding Afghan women and liberating oppressed people to nation-building.

Although the US invaded Afghanistan to avenge the 2,996 people killed on 9/11 and punish Al-Qaida and its hosts as part of its gunboat diplomacy, the killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011 was an opportunity for Washington to cut its losses and leave. Instead, it chose to double down, benefiting no one but the ever-growing military-industrial complex. While it took two months to topple the Taliban in 2001, it took twenty years for America and NATO to acknowledge that a technologically superior force can still lose the war.

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It’s true that since the US-led invasion in October 2001, maternal mortality has more than halved in Afghanistan; life expectancy has increased to 64 years from 56; and the literacy rate has risen from 8 per cent to roughly 43 per cent, according to the World Bank. More than 9 million children (40 per cent of them girls) were able to go to school, a nine-fold increase from when the Taliban was last in power. However, a lot more has gone wrong since the Taliban was last in control of the country.

Billions of tax dollars have been wasted on huge infrastructure projects that ultimately went to waste as canals, dams and highways soon fell into disrepair. Billions more were spent on anti-narcotics programmes, yet opium exports remain at a record high. Tens of billions were also spent on training, equipping and funding 300,000 Afghan military and police personnel, yet they all melted away in one fell swoop ahead of the advancing Taliban.

In total, over $2 trillion was spent lifting the veil — perhaps that should be the burqa — from the magnitude of Western hubris personified by America and the NATO alliance in order to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. The Afghans, meanwhile, have paid the highest price.

Why then do we express disbelief at the misogynist views of the Taliban but have little to say about the disturbing track record of killings, abuses and festering corruption left by US-NATO troops and the Afghan government that was put in power by the West? Since 2001, more than 170,000 Afghans have been killed, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, although Afghan deaths have never been considered worthy enough to record throughout the past 20 years, so we will never know the real casualty figures. In stark contrast, we know that precisely 3,592 international soldiers have been killed, as have 3,846 US private security contractors.

Why are these issues not central to this conversation? More importantly, is anyone ever going to be held to account for the grotesque loss of innocent lives on both sides of the fence, let alone waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayers’ money?

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.