By The situation with theTaliban capturing Kabul on Sunday, August 15th, and the hostilities committed against Afghan women has all eyes on Afghanistan — but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said in a statement issued on Sunday, “To say that today is anything short of a disaster would be dishonest. Worse, it was avoidable. … The fact that, at this hour, we have not even secured the civilian half of Kabul Airport is testament to our moral and operational failure.”
Unlike President Biden, who kept blaming everyone else instead of admitting his failure, Rep. Moulton decided to be more frank about the outcome, which Americans have been waiting for since former President Bush said “We will stay until the mission is done.”
“To our Afghanistan veterans and their families, I am too honest to stand here today and try to convince you that your sacrifice was worth it,” Rep. Moulton continued.
Having met with stark criticism, President Biden stated that his decision was simple, placing all the blame on the Afghan government for fleeing the situation.
“Look, it was a simple choice,” President Biden said. “When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government, get in a plane and taking off, and going to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the Afghan troops we had trained, up to 300,000 of them, just leaving their equipment and taking off — that was, you know, that’s what happened.”
Ahmad Massoud, the son of the Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who worked with the CIA to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, commented on this claim that suggests that the Afghan soldiers are unqualified saying: “When it comes to war, and when it comes to military, like in a war, everything is not just ammunition and guns.”
“Morale is everything. … And, unfortunately, with Americans’ departure and Americans’ withdrawal, the morale of Afghanistan’s soldiers — it crashed,” he continued.
Over the past years, the U.S. reiterated its hackneyed “We won’t abandon you,” kind of talk when addressing the Afghan people.
“[The U.S. soldiers] weren’t sent in to conquer; they were sent in to liberate. And they succeeded. And our military makes us proud,” former President Bush said in 2002. “We’re working hard in Afghanistan. … We’re rebuilding roads. … And we will work to help Afghanistan to develop an economy that can feed its people.”
Former President Obama initially followed former President Bush’s suit when it came to creating this make-believe narrative.
“Even as there will be dark days ahead in Afghanistan, the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance,” former President Obama said in 2011.
Yet, he soon shifted that narrative, and made it clear that he couldn’t care less about rebuilding Afghanistan.
“Our goal is not to build a country in America’s image, or to eradicate every vestige of the Taliban. … We must give Afghanistan the opportunity to stabilize. Otherwise, our gains could be lost.”
The fact that he correlated Afghanistan’s stability with his gains, and not with something that represented Afghanistan’s interests, says a lot about the hidden motive of the whole invasion — let alone all the war crimes that the U.S. has committed toward the Afghan people, especially women and children.
The Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported in 2004 that the U.S. military forces used “deadly force from helicopter gunships, and small and heavy arms fire, including undirected suppressing fire, during what are essentially law-enforcement operations to arrest persons in uncontested locales.”
“The use of these tactics has resulted in avoidable civilian deaths and injuries, and in individual cases may amount to violations of international humanitarian law,” HRW added.
Foremost is that Afghanistan has essentially been struggling in what for it has not been a two decade, but a four decade war, specifically since as early as 1979, when the United States started aiding Afghan insurgents against the Soviets.
In March 30, 1979, former Director of the CIA Robert Gates attended a meeting where former Under Secretary of Defense Walter B. Slocombe asked if “there was value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, [and] sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.”
Lisa Curtis, an Afghanistan expert and a National Security Council’s senior director for South and Central Asia during the Trump administration, said that the Doha negotiations have sidelined the interests of Afghanistan.
“It was an unfair negotiation, because nobody was looking out for the interests of the Afghan government.”
The Afghan people are scared of what is yet to come, because the United States decided to just throw them away in a snap like it’s nothing. If anything, the West decided it was the perfect time to feed their white savior complex by giving their attention to that piece of fabric worn by Muslim women (also known as hijab).
Women are being raped, children are being killed, and the West is panicking over pictures that show the Afghan women without hijab as the (civilized) “before” versus “after” wearing it to convey the message of how oppressed they have become. And, this essentially tells us that white people only care about the parts that feed their white supremacy.
If you really care about Afghanistan, then do something other than fighting in the comments on social media. There are many options available: call on the Biden administration to receive Afghan refugees, do volunteer work, donate, and essentially, fact-check what the mainstream media is selling you, so that you can spread the truth.