'If Our Goal Is to Stop Killing Afghans, We're Going About It All Wrong' - FAIR

'If Our Goal Is to Stop Killing Afghans, We're Going About It All Wrong' - FAIR



FEBRUARY 17, 2021
‘If Our Goal Is to Stop Killing Afghans, We’re Going About It All Wrong’
CounterSpin interview with Phyllis Bennis on ending the Afghan War
JANINE JACKSON



Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Phyllis Bennis about ending the Afghan War for the February 12, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin210212Bennis.mp3


Washington Post (11/25/20)

Janine Jackson: “An Abrupt US Withdrawal From Afghanistan Undermines the Fragile Peace” was the headline on a Washington Post op-ed back in November, from the co-chairs of the Afghanistan Study Group. It fit nicely with the Post’s own editorial view, expressed in September, that “the chance for an Afghan peace will depend on the willingness of the US president to maintain US forces in place until the Taliban shows a genuine will to settle.” A definitive break with Al Qaeda, the Post said, is a precondition.

In between, in October, the Post reported how the US military is “quietly” working with the Taliban in parts of Afghanistan to try and weaken the Islamic State—but don’t let that confuse you! The point is, a bipartisan panel says the Biden administration should ignore a May 1 deadline set for the withdrawal of 2,500 troops in order to, in the report’s words, “give the peace process sufficient time to produce an acceptable result.”

Let there be no mystery: Elsewhere, the report states the overall objective as “a negotiated stable peace that meets US interests.” What, truly, are we to make of the claim that the trick to ending the longest ever US war is to do something other than end it?

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She’s co-author of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer, as well as author of numerous titles, including Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terror. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

JJ: Maybe let’s start with what the report says is central: “The most important revision is to ensure that a complete withdrawal of US troops is based not on an inflexible timeline, but on all parties fulfilling their commitments.” I feel as though virtually every word in that sentence is more complicated or problematic than presented.

PB: Yeah, it’s pretty complicated. You’re absolutely right in what you’re challenging here. What this would do is say that these long-fought, very difficult negotiations that the US carried out with the Taliban—that led to an agreement last February, calling on the US to engage in a certain timetable of troop withdrawals, etc.—shouldn’t be taken seriously.

That is because our assessment is that the Taliban’s break with Al Qaeda—which is not, of course, any longer based in Afghanistan, and has not been for about 19 years now—that that’s not good enough. We want more; it’s not clear exactly what we want, but we want more. And it implies that somehow keeping US ground troops in Afghanistan is somehow going to help bring about better negotiations between the corrupt and very ineffective Afghan government and the Taliban.

The Taliban, of course, these days controls more territory in Afghanistan than the government does. And that’s with these decades of US occupation, by different numbers of troops, ranging from about 2,500 or so (what there are now), up to more than 100,000 that had been occupying Afghanistan in the earlier stages of this war.

So at the end of the day, we come back to the question of: What is this war for? Who benefits? Who benefits from ending it? And what does it even mean to talk about “ending”?

Because the other key point here, Janine, is that what the Afghan Study Group talked about, and what US policymakers debate—in Congress, in the White House, in the State Department, in the Pentagon—is the question of ground troops. There’s now about 2,500 ground troops, it’s not very many. They should leave, certainly, because they’re not playing a decent role there that’s helping anybody in particular, and it’s time we end this war.

But we should be very clear that it’s not primarily the ground troops that are causing such death and destruction to people in Afghanistan; that’s coming from US drone strikes and airstrikes. And no one is talking about ending that. That’s what they like to call the “counterterrorism war,” which is very separate from this question of, should we withdraw troops? What about our negotiations with the Taliban? It’s as if those things are completely separate.

JJ: Ah!

PB: When, in fact, it turns out that the US and its allies in the Afghan Air Force, which is not much of an air force, it’s a little air force, but it’s mainly US airstrikes and drone strikes—those strikes have killed more and more people in recent years. Last year, the airstrikes and drone strikes killed civilians at a rate 330% higher than 2017. So that now, in the last several years, more civilians are being killed by US air and drone strikes than are being killed by the Taliban. So if our goal in this war is to stop killing Afghans, we’re going about it all wrong.

JJ: And what an artificial distinction. What a joke played on people who were trying to follow along, to pretend that this troop withdrawal means “the US out of Afghanistan.”

PB: Indeed.

JJ: As though it meant a material change in the life of Afghanistan’s people.

PB: Right.


Washington Post (2/4/21)

JJ: David Ignatius underscored all the report’s points in the Washington Post, and said, basically, the US has to keep forces in Afghanistan because “admitting defeat”—which, let’s not even go into that imagery, but you know—”would mean a likely civil war”…. I’m going to try to say it dryly: “would mean a likely civil war,” would mean “Taliban dominance,” and would lead to an “eventual reestablishing of Al Qaeda safe havens.” Those are the reasons that the US needs to stay. I mean, it just sounds kind of absurdist.

PB: Well, what’s so interesting here, if you parse them out: The first one about, “it will lead to a civil war.” Well, there is a civil war. It’s precisely what’s underway. It’s just that the US is backing one side in the civil war.

There was a civil war in Afghanistan throughout the 1990s. In 1996, the Taliban won the civil war. They won it partly militarily—this was after years of brutal bombing, by all sides, of Kabul–and they partly won by convincing a lot of people in Afghanistan that they would end the war. And that was what led people to support them. It wasn’t because of their incredibly harsh interpretations of Islamist restrictions, particularly for women. It was because they said they would end the war, and that’s what people desperately needed in this desperately poor country.

So the notion that somehow this is not a civil war…. it’s just what the US did was, wipe out that government that had won the earlier civil war, installed its own government, and immediately a new war began between the Taliban and this government backed by the US. That’s still a civil war. It’s an Afghan war.

The only reason, I think, that Ignatius and others add in this notion of “if we don’t, the Taliban will take over and bring back Al Qaeda,” is grounded in fantasy. The notion that Al Qaeda is somehow not doing whatever they might do because they’re not in Afghanistan, first of all, makes no sense.

Secondly, they’re not in Afghanistan; their leadership is based in Pakistan. And, you know, the US has its own issues and relationships with Pakistan.


Phyllis Bennis: “There really isn’t any basis to say that continuing this war has any connection to protecting people in this country, to keeping Americans safe. There is no military solution to terrorism.”

But this notion that somehow, all the Taliban wants to do is bring back the relationship with Al Qaeda is based, as far as I can tell, on nothing. You know, this is not something that helped the Taliban, when they were in charge in Afghanistan. I don’t think they have any intention of trying to repeat that disaster, from their vantage point. So there really isn’t any basis to say that continuing this war has any connection to protecting people in this country, to keeping Americans safe. There is no military solution to terrorism, as we hear over and over again.

This war in Afghanistan alone, has cost almost $2 trillion. $2 trillion. That’s one of those numbers that is so enormous that it’s almost impossible to understand what it really means. More than 38,000 Afghan civilians have died in this war; 2,400 American soldiers, more than 2,400, have died in this war.

And for what? The Taliban still controls more territory than before. The US has invested $24 billion in economic development, and Afghans still live in one of the poorest countries in the world. Most Afghans still live in poverty. It has one of the worst levels of maternal mortality and infant mortality in the world. So exactly who do we think is benefiting from the continuation of this war?

JJ: Well, I wanted to ask you, finally, I feel as though it’s been answered, but I want to pull it out separately. It might seem a long time ago that the invasion of Afghanistan was presented as, after we got through various pretenses, about saving Afghan women from the Taliban, and you’ve touched on it. But I very recently saw a women’s website that said, “Don’t let the US abandon Afghan women.” And I just wonder, given what we know, how do you respond to that?

PB: Yeah, it’s a very serious question, because women in Afghanistan live very, very tough, difficult, challenging lives, very cruel in many cases, in terms of isolation, lack of decent access to education and healthcare, etc. In the cities, in particular, the two major cities of Kabul and Kandahar, I think that things are better for some women. There has been the creation of a very small middle class, and women have gotten access to education that they did not have before.

But the vast majority of women in Afghanistan don’t live in the cities. They live in tiny rural towns, little villages, small, isolated villages scattered over a huge country. And for those women, their lives are very constrained, and they were during the Taliban, and they are now. The difference is not very significant.

So I think, when we look at, “Will any women suffer?”: Yes, I think some will, if there were to be an absolute takeover by the Taliban, but that’s not really what’s on anybody’s agenda, I don’t think. In a number of areas, Taliban commanders have negotiated arrangements with local leaders, particularly local religious leaders, who also want their daughters to get access to education. And they’ve been able to create some schools for girls. So it’s not as bad in the areas of Taliban control as it was when the Taliban was in charge of the whole country, nor is it probably as good as in some small areas of Kabul.

But what we have to recognize is that the oppression of women in Afghanistan is not limited to the Taliban. The opposition to the Taliban, which the US embraced first back in the 1980s, as an anti-Soviet force, these were Afghans who were not part of the Taliban. They were brought to meet with President Reagan, at the time, in the White House, one of them a guy named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a well-known warlord. He’s credited, if you can use the term, for inventing the use of acid to be thrown in the face of young women and girls who have the audacity to claim they want to go to school. And he’s somebody on the side of the government, the US-backed government. So the notion that somehow there’s this enormous gap between the Taliban and the current government simply isn’t true.

I’ll end with one story: I spent some time years ago with a young woman who was, at the time, the youngest member of the Afghan parliament. After the installation of the government by the US, there were only a few women in the parliament. She was the youngest and, as a result, she was under enormous pressure. She had to move about with bodyguards; she couldn’t move, in many cases; she had to live in different safe houses; she was under enormous pressure. She was out of the country. At one point, we were both in Europe.

And I asked her, I said, “What about this whole question of what’s going to happen to women in civil society, particularly women’s organizations, if the US pulled out?”

And she said, “You know, we women in Afghanistan, and we in civil society, we have three enemies, three opponents in our country: One is the Taliban. Two is this group of warlords, disguised as a government, that the US supports. And the third is the US occupation.” She said, “If you in the West could get the US occupation out, we’d only have two.”

And I thought that was an extraordinarily pragmatic view. There was no illusion that pulling out US ground troops, or even, in this case, ending the air war, will end the war altogether. It will stop some killings, which is not a bad thing, given that we’ve been killing in Afghanistan for 19 years, almost 20 years. But it’s not going to end the conflict. It’s not going to end the war, only Afghans can do that. What our presence is doing is preventing them from resolving it, in ways that we may not like. But at the end of the day, it’s not our country. And we don’t have the right to tell Afghans or others how they should deal with governing their own countries.

JJ: Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you so much, Phyllis Bennis, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PB: Thank you, Janine; it’s been a pleasure.




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Filed under: Afghanistan, War & Military
Janine Jackson




Janine Jackson is FAIR’s program director and producer/host of FAIR’s syndicated weekly radio show CounterSpin. She contributes frequently to FAIR’s newsletter Extra!, and co-edited The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s (Westview Press). She has appeared on ABC‘s Nightline and CNN Headline News, among other outlets, and has testified to the Senate Communications Subcommittee on budget reauthorization for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Her articles have appeared in various publications, including In These Times and the UAW’s Solidarity, and in books including Civil Rights Since 1787 (New York University Press) and Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism (New World Library). Jackson is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and has an M.A. in sociology from the New School for Social Research.