Malalai Joya
Padmaja Challakere
“History shows no nation can donate liberation to another nation – they come to Afghanistan for their own interests,” –Malalai Joya tells The Independent.
A
s the last C-17 plane cleared the Afghan airspace on August 30 , General Frank McKenzie declared: “I’m here to announce the completion of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of the military mission to evacuate American citizens, third-country nationals, and vulnerable Afghans.” “Military mission” is the neutral word choice chosen to mark this uncontrolled withdrawal. The US mission in Afghanistan was never clear, so the war has been renamed and reframed several times: “Enduring Freedom,” “Good War,” “Necessary War,” etc. No good face can be put on this withdrawal, no curtain of heroism, no reconstruction. Only shock and astonishment! And, macabre images of Afghani people falling from the sky as the US plane took off from Kabul airport on August 16th 2021, chaos at the Kabul airport, and the devastating attack by ISIS which killed 110 civilians and 13 young American soldiers on August 27th. The Taliban, what is more, was seen posing unhurriedly for photographs in American gear with their fingers positioned on American rifles in seized palaces of US-allied Afghan warlords!
How could this happen? How could the Taliban move across the country with such unholy speed and take control in a matter of days, when the condition-of-Afghanistan reports by the Generals had been so blithely confident about the preparedness of the 300,000-strong Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) that the US had spent $89 billion on training? Without telling their Afghan counterparts, the U.S soldiers left the Bagram base on July 5th at 3:00 am, leaving behind everything they had outfitted Afghanistan with for 20 years (thousands of civil vehicles and several armored tanks and night-vision gear and even, rescue-dogs, after detonating the ammunition for heavy weapons). Maybe, the long-suffering Afghan population, harassed by the corrupt Afghan National Police, had already secretly acknowledged the Taliban as their leaders. We do not know. All we know is that Biden wanted this withdrawal done before the 20th anniversary of September 11th 2021. Murphy’s Law seems to have been at work—everything that could go wrong, did.
The American people seem to be waking up to a very-real knowledge of what the American government and the entrepreneurs: the Afghanistan experts, the corporations, the Afghanistan NGOS, and the upper echelons of the American military, have been doing in Afghanistan and in Washington DC. Sarah Chayes explained this in one word on the PBS News hour interview: “Corruption.” Sarah Chayes, the author of On Corruption in America and What is at Stake, says that the only topic that did not generate any conversation in Washington DC was the topic of corruption and fraud in relation to Afghanistan. During her time as an adviser to the Joint Chief of Staffs under President Obama, Sarah Chayes witnessed corruption at every level both in Washington DC and in Afghanistan, and she left her position as an adviser in 2011 ‘after it was officially decided that the US would ignore the high-level institutional corruption in Afghanistan and turn their focus to low-level corruption at the street-level, the purview of the military.’ Sarah Chayes was also witness to the Kabul Bank fiasco in 2011, in which people close to Hamid Karzai-Farnood and Ferozi- were caught skimming 1 billion dollars from the bank’s funds through fake front companies. The US decided to drop its investigation after Karzai made a phone call. Dilip Hero in his exhaustive investigation titled The Great Afghan Corruption Scam shows both the scale and the nitty-gritty of corruption in Afghanistan, and reveals how it was tied to an unstoppable expansion of consultants and defense contractors. The US bases in Afghanistan went from 29 to 400, requiring additional contracts for security and food on every single US base, making possible more grafts, more bribery, more overcharging. The US decided to pay for and train 300,000 Afghan National Security Forces, though it was a NATO “Resolute Support” initiative. Afghanistan, the most impoverished country in the world became a perfect funnel for massive wealth-transfer. Corruption: yes, we all suspected it, we all knew it, but turned a blind-eye to it, applying it only to particular and identifiable events relating to the money sent to Afghanistan that made its way back to Washington DC in the form of inflated fees of contractors and consultants and corporations and NGOS. As Mark W Herold’s work shows, all the contractors connected to Afghanistan got rich, while the reconstruction money was captured by warlords in the Afghan government and went into luxury projects like malls and hotels in Kabul, or into their private accounts for oceanfront mansions in the Palm Jumeirah Island in Dubai.
Who can fail to be shocked by the diabolical excess of expenditure in Afghanistan–2.26 trillion dollars of American taxpayer dollars, with $837 billion spent on war and $145 billion on reconstruction and nation-building, when only 16% percent of Afghanis have access to toilets and only 33% have access to electricity. But that is only one, though not a trivial, aspect of corruption.
Corruption is the most generalizable causal force of this “military quagmire” that cost 2.26 trillion dollars and took the lives of 2400 US troops, and of 241,000 people from Afghanistan and Pakistan. 71,000 of those killed were Afghan civilians. But the corruption responsible for a debacle on this scale is not just about thievery of public money and resources. To understand this, we should look at the falsehood and subterfuge that permeates the Afghanistan discourse in US- the lies to American people, the mendacious definition of allies and enemy, the definition of the Taliban insurgency, and the concealed history of the US collusion with radical Islamic forces through the CIA and ISI and Saudi Arabia.
It is no secret that the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan came after a long proxy-war began by the US in the 1980s, to draw the Soviets into a resource-draining war, a proxy-war that created Mujahudeens like the notorious Gulbuddin Hekmetyar (whose specialty was the Opium Trade and throwing acid on the faces of women who refused to wear the veil). Even though the US support of the Afghan mujahideen is fairly well-known, the long US collusion with radical Islamic forces, including terrorist organizations in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Afghanistan, is overlooked or concealed. As the work of journalists like John Pilger has shown, the CIA has worked along with warlords like the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, with the Tajik warlord Ahmed Shah Masoud (the commander of Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamaat-i-Islami) and with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, groomed by the powers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The US sent truck-loads of dollars and weapons to the mujahedeen, whose acts of mass violence included the killing of 65,000 civilians in 1992 for control over Kabul, rape and killings of women, the 2 day attack in November 2001 on Sultan Razia High School to flush out Taliban fighters, resulting in 570 deaths and the death from suffocation of close to 5000 Taliban prisoners held in a container and promised safe passage by Northern Alliance leader, Abdul Rashid Dostum during the siege of Kunduz in November 2001. This history of US collusion with the Afghan warlords and their exorbitant power and brutality is relevant, because this is the quagmire out of which the early Taliban insurgency rose. The early members of the Taliban were the young orphans from the Kabul civil war of 1992, later schooled in the Madrasas in Pakistan funded by Saudi Arabia, while the new Taliban of today has members from the region, also possibly Iran, and is restructured and trained by Pakistan’s ISI.
The well-funded think-tank industry of Afghanistan expertise in the US has been busy for the last 20 years churning out strategy advice about ‘the need for a stronger surge’ or for a ‘covert war’ after every news of Taliban success. These surges were not very successful against the Taliban, and were successful mainly in causing Afghan civilian deaths. For the Generals in the army, Afghanistan was exactly the same problem as Iraq, and their key goal, understandably, was to minimize American casualties. Think-tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Center for a New American Security, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace focused on ways of countering the escalating violence of the Taliban, but ignored the obvious correlation between escalation of Afghan civilian deaths (from drone-strikes, and especially the night-raids where soldiers entered homes of families at night and killed civilians) and the growing Taliban violence and retaliation. The policy-experts on US media regurgitated reports and analyses about the complex nodes of power between the Pushtuns and the Hazaras, or feudal warfare in Afghanistan, or Pakistan ISI’s role as both enabler of the Taliban insurgency and US ally, but they were uniformly silent about both the history of US collusion with radical Islamists and the present levels of Afghan civilian deaths from drone-strikes. Think-tanks like the Carr Institute focused on nation-building and reconstruction in Afghanistan, while Afghan activists like Pashtana Durrani and Seema Samar offered Americans reassurance on the PBS NewsHour by reporting on the gains made women’s rights and rising economic empowerment in Afghanistan. The US military power in the form of aerial bombardment or the classified war of night-raids is also expunged in most academic scholarship related to Afghanistan. For example, Ahmed Rashid, Afghanistan Policy analyst and author of Militant Islam: Taliban, Oil, and Fundamentalism, concedes that the “US ends up enabling and helping the wrong people” but this is only because of “inefficient resource allocation” or because of “miscalculation” or the “inability” or the “refusal to commit enough troops or arms for nation-building.” In Ahmed Rashid’s latest book Descent in Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, Rashid essentially lays the blame for terrorism in Afghanistan at the door of US good intentions: “its refusal to get involved in an arms race in Afghanistan that would put Washington at odds with Islamabad’s and Riyadh’s support for the Taliban.” This framing is unknotted in Malalai Joya’s memoir A Woman Among Warlords (2009), member of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan). While there is tremendous concern about women’s rights under Taliban rule in post-occupation, post-withdrawal Afghanistan, it is useful to bear in mind this reminder by Malalai Joya:
In the past thirty years, every kind of atrocity has been committed in Afghanistan in the name of socialism, religion, freedom, democracy, and liberation. Now these acts are justified by a so-called war on terror . . . . I have already written about the terror against women and the terror of poverty in my country. But those who get their news from the corporate media may not realize that allied attacks on supposed al-Qaeda and Taliban targets are also killing, maiming, and terrorizing innocent Afghan civilians. We live everyday of our lives in the terror of an endless war. (196)
Malalai Joya probes the 2010 Times cover story which carried the mutilated face of Nafisa framed by this question “What will happen when we leave Afghanistan?” to point out that what the cover story loudly neglects to say is that this is happening during the presence of US forces. As she puts it:
Today Afghans remain trapped between two enemies: the Taliban on one side and US/ NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other. We are feeling the squeeze and it is costing us in blood and tears. (227)
Marc W. Herold’s log of “Afghan civilian deaths from US Aerial Bombing” has kept track of the deaths of Afghan civilians since 2000, not only from aerial bombardments and direct hits but also from indirect causes such as starvation and poverty. For example, the log shows that 4000 Afghan civilians died between 2001 and 2003 from direct hits, and 20,000 from the indirect result of the U.S. airstrikes “which included cluster bombs which spread lethal yellow bomblets which often got mistaken for the bright yellow food-packets.” This log gives meaning to death of Afghan civilians.
When it comes to death, one would think numbers cannot mean all that much, but with Afghanistan, the numbers have taken on a monstrous life of their own. Obama’s presidency alone saw at least 14,000 Afghan civilians killed from drone-strikes, and from an unauthorized extension of war which tacitly approved increased Afghan civilian deaths in order to prevent US deaths and casualties through kill and capture lists and night-raids. But in the Pentagon/US mainstream media, it is same reality-effect that is generated, something we can call the Afghanistan Gothic, in which there is only one horror to be shocked by-the violence of the Taliban-the source of a terrorist threat on everything that we recognize as freedom.
In a previous essay, I focused on the rhetorical conventions of silence about the US war in the popular Afghanistan novels so that everything that happens in Afghanistan can be abstracted as “tragedy” or as “fated” or as “melodrama.” No war in history has been as framed, renamed, remade, and as written-out as the 20 year covert war and the 20 year military occupation of Afghanistan. The only pablum that the American people are given is this: ‘do not worry about the US war and its violence’ because Afghanistan is a state of exception, where the landscape itself is violent and blood-soaked; where the Taliban alone is responsible for the most gruesome violence. As embattled as the right and the left are, their central tone about Afghanistan echoes that of the former national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, who declared that ‘Afghanistan is a humanity problem on a modern-day frontier between barbarism and civilization.” In 2011, when the Obama government was getting ready to stage the attack on Libya to capture Gaddafi, Fareed Zakaria, political commentator on CNN, who is considered ‘polished and rational and not a right-wing crusader’ (and sits on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations), could publicly admit something like this on cable TV:
ZAKARIA: There’s a lot of covert stuff we can do. We can effectively fund the Contra war against Gaddafi, the way we did in Afghanistan.
COOPER: So you think the opposition should be armed?
ZAKARIA: I think the opposition–I think that the CIA should start
looking into covert actions that can fund the rebels that can provide
food, logistics, weaponry. And if Gaddafi realizes this– and
believe me, we don’t need to advertise it — he would realize, he will
see, the people around him will see he can’t win. –(March 4, 2011 CNN Transcripts)
This does not seem shocking or sinister to most people. On the contrary, it appears as a normal part of our presupposed non-violence, our good-violence, our activism on behalf of others. No disavowals needed! In his latest transmogrification, Zakaria said that Biden should be praised for making “a hard decision on Afghanistan” instead of kicking the can (by which he presumably means Afghanistan and its people) down one more time” and that since US has already spent enough money supporting Afghanistan’s Defense budget, which is larger than its GDP, Afghanistan now needs to “stabilize itself” on its own. This hair-raising lack of compunction is not uncommon among the Afghanistan media pundits. It gives us a glimpse into the hypocritical and mendacious policy-makers, in other words, into what Sarah Chayes said about corruption as a norm in the US political economy. But the way in which the frame of the war on Afghanistan has been set up, we are only positioned to wonder at the horror of what the Taliban might do, and ignore everything else.
In Arudhi Verma’s interview with William Dalrymple, there emerged, or almost did, a fascinating story and image about another withdrawal from Afghanistan, that of President Ashraf Ghani who fled the country with 4 car-loads of money, about $169 million dollars, all of which could not be stuffed into the helicopter, and so had to be left on the tarmac of the airport–a paradigmatic image, if ever there was one, of the intercourse between the centralized corruption of Empire and the despotic corruption of the Afghan ruling elite. But there was not much listening going on, and the interviewer did not pursue this corruption story. Instead she asked the most popular question, ‘whether there is a danger that Taliban’s treatment of women in Afghanistan might spread to other Islamic nations.’ Dalrymple too stuck with this line of inquiry, intoning that he did not foresee a “Domino-Effect” but hypothesized that Afghanistan might become like Saudi Arabia where women cannot drive!
And so it will go on; our ears will reverberate with the echo of those falsities and obfuscations put out by the US media. So long as we are in thrall to this seductive lie—that ‘no matter what we do, we are good because we are fighting the evil of Taliban, hideous oppressors of women, the violence of that hegemonic war and corruption will slip under the rug of our memories, while impoverished, blighted Afghanistan lives with the legacy of that hegemonic war and corruption.
Epilogue
In 2010 the Afghanistan Log of Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks had identified the scope of this corruption with 76,000 bits of raw data and behind-the scene cables. The WikiLeaks also showed the cover-up of successful attacks by the resilient Taliban and their significance. Even as the Taliban is now parading in US Humvees and Black-Hawks, it is important to acknowledge that deaths of Afghan civilians exist as ghosts that speak of the crimes against them, and we are deeply implicated in the violence there. Afghanistan is no symbolic threatening whale “Moby Dick” that has been eating up Empires for hundreds of years. There is an embodied reality there that cannot be abstracted into something atavistic or tragic or something that needs to be rescued by bombardment. Nothing can prevent the repetition of the last twenty years of US interventions in Afghanistan in the absence of any principle above and outside the violence of US hegemony and the willing acquiescence of the global community.
Despite the very real fear about Taliban’s violence and atrocities, and the very real possibility of infighting among warlords, and regional political interference, I want to send out a cry of hope to the people of Afghanistan by referencing this Poshto ballad that says it all beautifully.
“Afghan Da Zamong Zeba Watan” by Ustad Awalmir
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Notes The epigraph at the top of text is from: https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/south-asia/malalai-joya-afghanistan-activist-peace-b1897113.html
Padma Challakere teaches high-school English in St.Paul, MN. She has taught literature and writing in liberal arts colleges in Minnesota for two decades. In the last few years, she has published essays in Counter Punch, The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and The Wire on topics such as the Afghanistan war novel, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kishori Amonkar, V.S Naipaul, and Bret Easton Ellis.
More by Padma Challakere in The Beacon
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