Three years on. Afghanistan’s civilians still paying a savage price for the ‘war on terror’.

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It will soon be three years since the U.S. formally left Afghanistan with its tail between its legs: all pretence of their ‘war on terror’ gone and all their hubristic claims about defeating the Taliban abandoned.

The war lasted twenty years and claimed the lives of at least 176,000 people including 46,000 civilians.  The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is replete with well documented human rights abuses including deliberately undercounting civilian deaths from airstrikes, summary executions, torture and a casual brutalisation of the population, who were demonstrably seen and treated as less than human by the occupying forces. 

Western post mortems into this illegal, disastrous and wholy immoral war have predictably focused on the cost in U.S. dollars and U.S. soldiers. €2 trillion (€300M a day) was spent.

[We at the Haze are not the only ones to notice how splendidly the war in Ukraine has acted a a replacement cash cow for the U.S. military industrial complex – at almost no risk to U.S. soldiers]

2,448 American service members, 3,846 U.S. contractors, 1,144 allied service members and 66,000 members of the Afghan national military and police were killed in the war, with the Taliban and other opposition armies losing 51,191 fighters. Violence in the nation is ongoing. 

The people who have paid the most savage cost for the U.S. invasion are the civilian population and they will continue to do so for decades to come.

Afghanistan now suffers from one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. According to Human Rights Watch in 2023, two-thirds of its population live with food insecurity, and 875,000 children face acute malnutrition.

As much as half of the population suffers from depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Saleem et al., 2021, p. 1). An EU survey in 2018 found that “85 percent of the Afghan population had experienced or witnessed at least one traumatic event, and averaged four”. How perfectly perverse it is that Bush’s ‘war on terror’ has left millions of innocent people traumatised for life.   

According to Save the Children in 2019, 20 million Afghan children woke up daily, afraid of being killed or maimed from explosive remnants of war: hard to imagine that has improved much or at all.

Since the Taliban takeover in 2021, already precarious healthcare systems  have declined further as international donors have mostly walked away. There is mass unemployment and millions of Afghans are close to starvation.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) provided a recent update of the situation in Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrawal,  detailing “massive poverty” across the country.

Afghanistan is also on the frontline of climate change with about 120,000 people recently affected by flash flooding and mudslides in several regions in the country. Hundreds were killed, entire villages destroyed and tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land devastated. Afghanistan remains wholly unprepared to deal with the increasingly deadly effects of the climate vandalism for which they bear almost no responsibility, with the world’s single largest polluters being the U.S. military

This is the familiar pattern. Scratch the veneer of western propaganda and one finds a string of zones all sacrificed at the altar of an aggressively expansionist empire. The U.S. does not act as the world’s moral police force; it has never been engaged in a ‘war against terror’ in Afghanistan or anywhere else and its ‘humanitarian interventions’ are nothing of the kind. 

The arrival of the U.S. military and corporations has been a harbinger of doom for democratically elected governments, civilian populations, human rights and the environment across the globe. The scale and ferocity of western propaganda operations show just how much needs to be hidden and tastefully reframed for western audiences.

This article acts as something of a vigil for those suffering in Afghanistan. I sadly suspect that similar articles will be written about Syria, Ukraine and Palestine twenty years from now (unless Ukraine escalates into nuclear war, in which case there will be no-one left to write the vigils).

I have no time for brands of empire or imperialism of any flavour – be it American, Chinese or Russian – but it is important to understand that the most powerful and dangerous empire in the world right now remains the U.S. / NATO axis.

Start with Afghanistan and then pan around the world to view Serbia, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Yemen, Ukraine and now Palestine. Bombs, sanctions, regime change and corporate exploitation: the four pillars of U.S. foreign policy since WW2.

The U.S. has trashed Afghanistan as a nation: part of a history of meddling that goes back 40+ years. That they now breezily abrogate all responsibility towards the innocent civilian population it has impoverished and traumatised is no surprise.

One might say that Afghanistan has been thrown back to the wolves of the Taliban and the Western media are very keen to reframe the suffering there as a consequence of their renewed rule, but in truth Afghanistan represents yet another calamitous failure of U.S. foreign policy and it is Afghan civilians who are paying the price.

The U.S. should be vigorously encouraged to re-direct the €300 million a day they were happy to spend on war in Afghanistan to the various aid agencies, health organisations and NGO’s which have been left to cope with the dystopian mess they left behind them in 2021.

After that what the world needs from the U.S. is for them to stay at home for a few decades at least, where they can focus on putting their own dysfunctional house in order – before its pulls itself and the rest of the world apart.