A graveyard of clichés,
Twenty years after the U.S. invaded and occupied Afghanistan, it has exited the country, leaving behind a house of horrors.
Twenty years since U.S. president George W. Bush delivered to the world an ultimatum through a false choice between his army and the Taliban.
Twenty years of the U.S. and its allies butchering a populace in the name of liberating it, a populace that was already torn apart by Soviet warfare and a civil war.
“They pushed us from the frying pan into the fire as they replaced the barbaric regime of the Taliban with the misogynist warlords,” activist Malalai Joya told various media. Joya is a courageous former MP who was thrown out of the Afghan parliament in 2007 after criticizing the presence of corrupt and abusive U.S.-backed warlords, and the Taliban.
Twenty years in which the ousted Taliban has only been gaining strength, riding on the popularity of its insistence that the Americans leave.
But 20 years that are invariably decontextualized from the 200 years prior in western talking points. Too few in the media and, by extension, society consider the implication of those two centuries of western imperialism that claimed the land, maimed it, looted it, took it apart and left it thrashing about. Although as the tired trope of “graveyard of empires” shows, they’re not quite so unaware of that continuity, either.
Afghanistan is referred to as “medieval” in some corners. It’s often called a “tribal society” of “warlords” and “ethnic conflicts” that destroyed a land where, would you know it: Women once wore mini-skirts!
“I find that really appalling,” Justin Podur said of the reference to “medieval.” Podur is a York University professor, author of several books about U.S. and Canadian foreign policy and cohost of the “Civilizations” historical podcast.
“All of Afghanistan’s problems are modern,” he said.
The religious justification for the oppression of women comes from schools of thought such as 18th-century Wahhabism (Saudi), 19th-century Deobandi (South Asia), and the 20thcentury Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt), Podur says. “Those are what you would call Islamist politics of today. That whole time Afghanistan was under some form of imperial interference.
“Medieval has nothing to do with it. Medieval Islam was so progressive compared to medieval Europe.”
Afghanistan is not just a place where empires came to die, but where these empires kill millions, a fact that is erased from the “graveyard of empires” cliché. That phrase portrays Afghans as unruly, untameable and uncivilizable, despite best intervention efforts.
It also allows imperialists to shrug off responsibilities after making a colossal mess.
Britain’s strategic interest in Afghanistan that began in the 1830s sprouted from the fear — a fanciful one, some historians say — that the Russian Empire coveted its grand prize, India. At the time, India was financing Britain’s Industrial Revolution and providing manpower for war. On the map at least, Afghanistan looked like a much-needed buffer.
Podur cites Charles McGregor, a commander in the British army in 1879, as saying about the Afghans: “We’ve got hold of a race of tigers and only with the iron rod can we impose our will.”
That gaze steeped in an Orientalist archetype of the violent Afghan leads to calling mujahedeen commanders “warlords,” a word that stresses their aggressiveness, and to an over-emphasis on the idea of internal division.
To be sure, terms such as “tribal” and “ethnic conflict” are not without salience. A tribe is like an extended family, and in Afghanistan people do ask each other that to know what family someone is from. As Podur says, that’s of relevance if, say, you’re travelling there. Militarily it carries the same implication as highlighting “ethnic conflict”: that this is basically not a cohesive society and needs a little bit of imperialism to get it on track.
The military strategy is premised on a divide-and-rule philosophy, because the colonizer can then say: this minority group needs protection from this majority group. There is often truth to the divisions between groups, too; a new investigation by Amnesty found Taliban tortured and massacred members of the Hazara minority in July.
What gets de-emphasized in the overall narrative is the existence of multiethnic Afghan nationalism, Podur says.
What about the women? What about the meme showing “before” images of Afghan women in mini-skirts in the 1970s and current images of women behind a burqa or niqab?
Not only does this ridiculous imagery ignore the achievements of women who prefer to be fully covered, it reduces the idea of women’s liberation to the clothes we wear and how much skin we show. It misleads the viewer into thinking the lives of a few elite in Kabul during the reign of Ahmed Zahir Shah were representative of Afghanistan. It elides that reality of an impoverished Afghanistan then caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-backed mujahedeen and Soviet warfare.
And it is used by imperialists to suggest Afghanistan has the potential to be westernized. In a rich essay titled “The Weaponization of Nostalgia: How Afghan Miniskirts Became the Latest Salvo in the War on Terror,” writer Alex Sims says photos of these women were shown to former president Donald Trump “to suggest he shouldn’t give up on Afghanistan because Afghans could, essentially, be ‘civilized’ again.”
It is true that Afghan women are desperately trying to escape the torturous clutches of Taliban. It is equally true that the mujahedeen commanders the U.S. has traditionally backed are not ideologically different from the Taliban when it came to women.
“Historically speaking, the most oppressive forces have been aligned with imperialism,” Podur said.
“This so-called peace that U.S. and NATO is talking about is more dangerous than war,” Joya told Democracy Now in July.
“Still now you see the rape cases, domestic violence, acid attacks, forced marriages, self-immolation, beating women publicly with lashes, stoning to death. Millions of Afghans are suffering from insecurity, corruption, joblessness, poverty. And still, most of Afghan women are the victim.”
Rescuing women has long been a colonial fig leaf to justify invasions. Not much actually changes on the ground.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or SIGAR, an independent agency created by the U.S. Congress, began a “Lessons Learned” program in 2014 in which it audits U.S. efforts. These wide-eyed reports are credulous of America’s pure intentions to “reconstruct” Afghanistan. But even SIGAR’s latest report says that although there was some success, in sectors spanning health, education, rule of law, women’s rights, infrastructure, security assistance and others, U.S. agencies struggled to effectively measure results while sometimes relying on shaky data to make claims of success.
“Billions of reconstruction dollars were wasted as projects went unused or fell into disrepair.”
In the end, as Podur points out, if we were to rightly view the Taliban as failing any test of good governance, we would have to say the same about the U.S. — and its allies.