We are not lacking symbols when it comes to defining the 20-year War on Terror that the United States and its allies inflicted on Afghanistan, and if the sight of multiple men falling to their deaths from an American aircraft fleeing Kabul doesn’t capture the senseless violence that the people of Afghanistan have endured, I don’t know what does.
Speaking of senselessness, global leaders are seemingly in a competition to outdo each other on insensitivity. US President Joe Biden delivered a speech riddled with attempts to rebuild the narrative around what the US military has been doing in Afghanistan all these years, conveniently laying the blame on a weak Afghan military unwilling to fight, when in fact this force - which admittedly is corrupt and has soldiers with low morale - has lost over 70,000 personnel fighting the Taliban.
The Intercept’s Ryan Grim offers an interesting perspective in his newsletter on why this war ended the way it did:
…the only way for there to have been an orderly transfer of power in the wake of the U.S. departure was for the process to have been negotiated as a transfer of power. And to negotiate a transfer of power requires acknowledging -- and here’s the hard part for the U.S. -- that power is transferring.
Therein lies the contradiction: An orderly exit required admitting defeat and negotiating the unutterable -- surrender to the Taliban.Instead, the U.S. preferred to maintain the fiction that it was handing over power to the Afghan government, whatever that was, and to former President Ashraf Ghani. We would rather risk the chaos we’re now witnessing than admit defeat. After all, it’s mostly not our lives on the line anymore, but rather the lives of Afghans who helped us over the past 20 years.
Other world leaders haven’t fared any better. French President Emmanuel Macron said the quiet part out loud when his first reaction to this humanitarian crisis was to prepare for the influx of 'irregular migration'. Pakistan’s premier, Imran Khan, celebrated the Taliban for breaking 'the shackles of slavery'. Meanwhile, China seems to think the Afghans chose the Taliban so they’re ready to deal with the devil.
Suffice it to say, most global powers are ducking out of a mess they created and none of them are showing any regard for the people who didn’t choose to be a part of this conflict: the people of Afghanistan.
One way for NATO countries to attempt to make up for this crisis would be to open its doors to Afghan refugees but so far the welcome has been lukewarm. The UK is only planning on taking 5,000 refugees this year while the US has so far taken less than 500 refugees fleeing the Taliban this year. Canada and New Zealand have announced plans to take in some refugees but their numbers are paltry in the face of the looming crisis. Germany, and to a large extent the rest of Europe, doesn’t seem too keen to host either, and would rather support neighbouring countries, such as Pakistan, Iran, India, etc, to take in the refugees instead.
Even if the rest of the world throws open its doors for Afghanistan, let’s not forget that we are asking the people to pay a huge price for something they didn’t choose to happen: giving up their homeland. Settling in a new place can be difficult as it is but when it happens through force, it impacts generations to come.
How are countries, both in the Global North and the ones neighbouring Afghanistan, preparing for the arrival of refugees? If we can’t expect empathy from the political leadership, how can we demonstrate it to our Afghan neighbours and colleagues? What happened in Afghanistan has happened before in other places and is bound to happen again when we look at how much profits this war made for some (more on this below). What can we do to make sure next time we are facing such a choice, we choose peace instead of war?
We hope The Global Tiller today helps you reflect on this ongoing crisis. Let us know what you’re thinking.
Until next week, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
If you’d like to read our previous issues, you can access our archives here.
Who made the money?
The War on Terror may have ended in disgrace, much like all wars do, but it certainly made lots of money for certain groups of people. Here are some articles that detail how much money private security companies made at the cost of precious lives and how exploitation of those from poor countries happens no matter which side of the conflict they lie:
…and now what?
“If you want peace, prepare for war”
This idiom has always sounded weird to me. It presents peace as a passive situation that only works if and only if everything is done to deter conflict. Doesn’t it put everything and everyone feel as if they’re under threat, even when there’s no conflict to begin with?
I can accept this mentality when it comes to rain, as the saying goes in my native Brittany: if it’s not raining, it means it’s going to rain. War is surely deadlier and costlier than packing an umbrella.
The world has worked under this proverb for too long. We tried to do everything for peace to happen yet somehow it didn’t. We may have managed to avoid world wars for more than 70 years now but we have been embroiled in wars and conflicts that have gotten nastier over time. Even if they look "clean" (drone strikes look 'visually cleaner' than the bloody charge of an infantry) but they’re still dirty and nasty, and civilians always end up being the victims, along with the soldiers.
This system, of being in a state of constant war, seems to be a failure. For 20 years, the US have avoided war on their soil by maintaining war outside, in Afghanistan. “We were not there for nation-building,” President Biden claimed. Then what were those 20 years for? Preparing peace by making war? By increasing the weight and influence of the “military industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned the world against way back when?
Where is this peace eventually? The major global powers are so prepared for war that they have enclosed themselves in cocoons to maintain an illusion of peace, which comes from rejecting people in need, closing borders and getting afraid every time a conflict gets “out of hand” (although one could argue war is already a situation out of hand).
This warmonger mindset has made dogs of wars out of us, all the way to the heart of those considered as great democracies, who have seen war-obsessed fanatics rushing into their “temples of democracy” in full military gear. Maybe because for 20 years that’s all they saw in the media: war, violence, conflicts, fear of the enemy.
Until the end of 2019, we were all bracing ourselves for yet another war with Iran, which thankfully didn’t happen so we declared war against Covid-19. Most political leaders framed the global pandemic response in war lingo, because that’s the only way they know how. So instead of treating it like a virus that can be overcome through science, we divided ourselves and picked sides.
This black-and-white approach to problems has caused too much damage until now. We’re still trying to apply a framework that dates back decades, if not centuries, to modern, complex challenges. We’re no longer facing challenges restricted to our communities but at the scale of our species. Complex problems that are beyond power struggle and ideological fights.
As long as we’ll stay stuck in this binary vision of the world, we won’t be able to understand the spectrum of the challenges to come. By then, it will no longer be about peace but about solace.
Philippe - Founder - Pacific Ventury