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Despite four decades of imperial interventions, the United States was defeated in Afghanistan. Tariq Ali explains the long history of meddling in Afghanistan — and why the US's defeat will set back the broader project of American military supremacy.
The United States invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 because its leaders wanted revenge. The US occupation brought misery and destruction for the Afghan people, and its failure was guaranteed from the start.
The US military has lost enormous legitimacy because of its humiliation in Afghanistan. We will need to remind people of that humiliating defeat every single time the Pentagon tries to sell us another war.
When President Trump scuttled talks for a peace deal in Afghanistan, liberal media heaved a sigh of relief. But despite the risks, an end to the US occupation is a precondition for peace in the country.
Some hawkish pundits are asking why must America leave Afghanistan when it has a permanent military presence at over 700 military bases around the world. They’re accidentally suggesting a good point: America should leave Afghanistan, and those 700 bases should go, too.
The "decent left" was wrong: a blood-soaked occupation did not lead to a promising post-Taliban future.
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan signals the US has lost the longest war in its history. And even if the warmongers don’t want to admit it, that failure shows the US can’t just bend the world to its will.
Despite its claims to be building democracy in Afghanistan, the US’s War on Terror pushed the country deeper into chaos. The United States should be held fully responsible for this failure by the rest of the world.
The United States suffered grave losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as it did in Vietnam. But we shouldn’t mistake revisions of US military strategy after calamitous failures for a turn away from US imperialist ambitions.
The occupation of Afghanistan was a disaster — but the US’s failure is already being used to justify even longer “humanitarian interventions.” As after Vietnam, military men are using scenes of disorderly departure to prepare the ground for the next war.
Some influential voices are calling for a policy aimed at turning Ukraine into an “Afghanistan-style” quagmire for Russia. It's a disastrous idea that would prolong Ukrainian suffering and ignores the lessons of countless foreign misadventures.
Donald Trump thinks the US was constrained by “political correctness” in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But those wars were characterized by thorough dehumanization and staggering destruction. What type of war would be politically incorrect enough for Trump?
In the record of the disastrous war in Afghanistan, little attention has been paid to the horrific role of Canada’s private security firms.
The forgotten war in Afghanistan, a senseless waste of money and lives, will soon turn 20, and there is no sign that Joe Biden is serious about ending it. When it comes to US militarism, the much-heralded leftward shift in American politics has so far had little effect.
The US may not be completely ending its military adventure in Afghanistan, but Joe Biden’s decision to pull out troops is a victory for democracy over national security authoritarianism.
With hawks thirsting for blood after last week’s ISIS attack, the Biden administration just slaughtered ten Afghans about to be resettled in the US. The tragic story is a miniature version of how the entire war has gone.
Read past the headlines, and it turns out Joe Biden’s supposed withdrawal from Afghanistan is nothing of the kind — it delays ending the war while envisioning continued “anti-terrorism” action in the future with no end in sight.
In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam and Iraq, US elites sold us a vision of the world in which the United States alone has not just the power but the duty to forcibly reshape the world how it sees fit. They have again proven utterly incapable of doing so.
As the war in Afghanistan slowly grinds to an end, many in the foreign policy establishment want to tell you it was a “good war gone bad.” That’s false. The war in Afghanistan never should have been waged in the first place.
The rapid collapse of Afghanistan to Taliban rule has created a chaotic, complicated situation. But here’s the fundamental point: the US has nothing to show for two decades of bloodshed and occupation.