Afghanistan: graveyard of great empires
THE Afghanistan issue is the final nail in the coffin for the US as the American Empire starts to decline on the back of wars, exploitation, criminality, deceit and moral degradation where anything goes.
The 20th anniversary of the so-called “war on terror”, which began with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, is marked by the withdrawal of US troops and the “return” of the Taliban to Kabul. In some ways, we are back in 2001, and in others – there is no going back, given that the US war on terror has killed over 800 000 people, and displaced 37 million more.
Deaths authored by the Taliban are registered as more deathly than the deaths of Afghans by US drone strikes, air strikes, the deaths by Afghan militias (death squads) trained and funded by the CIA, the deaths of Afghans by the most criminal commanders, their militias and the Afghan state that embraced them, and certainly more deathly than Afghans dying en route crossing multiple borders.
The West's war on terror is often told like a fairytale, of Muslim women as damsels in distress, and white knights bravely fighting brutes to free them. Monsters repel as much as they fascinate, but ultimately, they mask the violence which made them. As scholars committed to uncompromising anti-imperial analysis, and who study the “war on terror”, we stand with others in facing the daunting task of offering critical theorising of Afghanistan today that does not add another layer of betrayal of the Afghan population.
The dominance of the geopolitics of statecraft and development approaches coupled with the overwhelming whiteness of Afghanistan Studies, however, contributes to what we consider and experience as a long-standing deep crisis of knowledge production on Afghanistan.
Afghanistan lives up to its reputation as the graveyard of great empires such as Britain, Russia (ex Soviet Union), Persia, Rome, Ancient Greece and now the US empire.
Finally, the experience of the past 20 years in Afghanistan, despite all its shortcomings and flaws, on balance, produced better outcomes for most Afghans compared with the period of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in the 1990s.
The failures of the last two decades can be better explained by denied promises of self-governance because the post-2001 leaders of the country centralised power and behaved as authoritarian rulers.
The way to remedy the ills of the past two decades, while preserving the benefits, would be more selfgovernance and representative governance, not elitism, authoritarianism, and centralisation of power. The international community, especially Afghanistan’s Muslim neighbours, must support the Taliban in bringing about peace, stability and economic growth to the Afghan people. We owe it to the long-suffering, poor and oppressed people of Afghanistan.
SAMAOEN OSMAN | Crawford