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Ending the US
Empire of War, Corruption and Poverty
The US can either continue with its fruitless attempt to control
others through militarism and coercion, or it can use this
opportunity to rethink its place in the world.
By Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J.S. Davies
September 07, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House
- Americans have been shocked by reports of thousands of
Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban, whose militants
swept through Afghanistan and returned to power on August 15.
This was followed by a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic
State in Khorasan Province (IS-KP) that
killed at least 170 people,
including 13 US troops. Some eyewitnesses
told the BBC that “significant
numbers” of those killed were shot dead by American and foreign
forces.
Even as UN
agencies warn of an impending
humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the US Treasury has
frozen nearly all of the Afghan
central bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves,
depriving the new government led by the Taliban of funds it will
desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and
provide basic services. Under pressure from the Biden
administration, the International Monetary Fund
decided not to release $450
million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan
to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
The US and other
Western countries have also halted humanitarian aid to
Afghanistan. After chairing a G7 summit on Afghanistan on August
24, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that withholding
aid and recognition gave them
“very considerable leverage — economic, diplomatic and
political” over the Taliban.
Western politicians
couch this leverage in terms of human rights, but they are
clearly trying to ensure that their Afghan allies retain some
power in the new government and that Western influence and
interests in Afghanistan do not end with the Taliban’s return.
This leverage is being exercised in dollars, pounds and euros,
but it will be paid for in Afghan lives.
US Spending in
Afghanistan
To read or listen to
Western analysts, one would think that the United States and its
allies’ 20-year war in Afghanistan was a benign and beneficial
effort to modernize the country, liberate Afghan women and
provide health care, education and good jobs, and that this has
all now been swept away by capitulation to the Taliban. The
reality is quite different and not so hard to understand.
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The United States
spent
$2.26 trillion on its war in
Afghanistan. Spending that kind of money in any country should
have lifted most people out of poverty. But the vast bulk of
those funds, about $1.5 trillion, went to absurd, stratospheric
military spending to maintain the US-led military occupation,
drop tens of thousands of bombs and missiles,
pay private contractors and
transport troops, weapons and military equipment back and forth
around the world for 20 years.
Since the United States
fought this war with borrowed money, it has also cost half a
trillion dollars in interest payments alone, which will continue
far into the future. Medical and disability costs for US
soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq already amount to over
$350 billion, and they will likewise keep mounting as the
soldiers age. Medical and disability costs for both of those
US-led wars could eventually reach another trillion dollars over
the next 40 years.
So, what about
“rebuilding Afghanistan”? Congress appropriated
$144 billion for reconstruction
in Afghanistan since 2001, but $88 billion of that was spent to
recruit, arm, train and pay the Afghan “security forces” that
have now disintegrated, with soldiers returning to their
villages or joining the Taliban. Another $15.5 billion spent
between 2008 and 2017 was, as per Al Jazeera, documented as
“waste, fraud and abuse” by the US Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Corruption
The crumbs left
over, less than 2% of total US spending on Afghanistan, amount
to about $40 billion, which should have provided some benefit to
the Afghan people in economic development, health care,
education, infrastructure and humanitarian aid. But, as in Iraq,
the government the US installed in Afghanistan was notoriously
corrupt, and its corruption only became more entrenched and
systemic over time. Transparency International (TI) has
consistently
ranked Afghanistan as among the
most corrupt countries in the world.
Western readers
may think that this corruption is a long-standing problem in the
country, as opposed to a particular feature of the US-led
occupation, but this is not the case. TI
noted that “it is widely
recognized that the scale of corruption in the post-2001 period
has increased over previous levels.” A 2009
report by the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned that
“corruption has soared to levels not seen in previous
administrations.” Those administrations would include the
Taliban government that US and NATO invasion forces removed from
power in 2001, and the Soviet-allied socialist
governments that were
overthrown by the US-supported precursors of al-Qaeda and the
Taliban in the 1980s, destroying the substantial progress they
had made in education, health care and women’s rights.
A 2010
report by Anthony H. Cordesman,
a Pentagon official under Ronald Reagan, entitled “How America
Corrupted Afghanistan,” chastised the US government for throwing
gobs of money into that country with virtually no
accountability. The New York Times
reported in 2013 that every
month for a decade, the CIA had been dropping off suitcases,
backpacks and even plastic shopping bags stuffed with US dollars
for the Afghan president to bribe warlords and politicians.
Corruption also
undermined the very areas that Western politicians now hold up
as the successes of the occupation, like education and health
care. The education system has been
riddled with schools, teachers
and students that exist only on paper. Afghan pharmacies are
stocked with fake, expired or
low-quality medicines, many smuggled in from neighboring
Pakistan. At the personal level, corruption was fueled by civil
servants like teachers earning only
one-tenth the salaries of
better-connected Afghans working for foreign NGOs and
contractors.
Rooting out
corruption and improving Afghan lives has always been secondary
to the primary US goal of fighting the Taliban and maintaining
or extending its puppet Afghan government’s control. As TI
reported, the US “has
intentionally paid different armed groups and Afghan civil
servants to ensure cooperation and/or information and cooperated
with governors regardless of how corrupt they were… Corruption
has undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by fuelling
grievances against the Afghan government and channelling
material support to the insurgency.”
Poverty and Freezing
Funds
The endless violence of
the US-led occupation and the corruption of the Afghan
government boosted popular support for the Taliban, especially
in rural areas where three-quarters of Afghans live. The
intractable poverty of Afghanistan also contributed to the
Taliban victory, as people naturally questioned how their
occupation by wealthy countries like the United States and its
Western allies could leave them in such abject poverty.
Well before the
current crisis, the
number of Afghans reporting
that they were struggling to live on their current income
increased from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2018. A 2018
Gallup poll found the lowest
levels of self-reported “well-being” that Gallup has ever
recorded anywhere in the world. Afghans not only reported record
levels of misery, but also unprecedented hopelessness about
their future.
Despite some
gains in education for girls, only a third of Afghan
girls attended primary school
in 2019 and only 37% of
adolescent Afghan girls were
literate. One reason that so few children go to school in
Afghanistan is that more than 2 million
children between the ages of 6
and 14 have to work to support their poverty-stricken
families.
Yet instead of
atoning for their role in keeping most Afghans mired in poverty,
Western leaders are now cutting off desperately needed economic
and humanitarian aid that was funding
three-quarters of Afghanistan’s
public sector and made up 40% of its total GDP.
In effect, the United
States and its allies are responding to losing the war by
threatening the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan with a
second: economic war. If the new Afghan government does not give
in to their “leverage” and meet their demands, our leaders will
starve their people and then blame the Taliban for the ensuing
famine and humanitarian crisis, just as they demonize and blame
other victims of US economic warfare, from Cuba to Iran.
After pouring
trillions of dollars into endless war in Afghanistan, America’s
main duty now is to help the 38 million Afghans who have not
fled their country, as they try to recover from the terrible
wounds and trauma of the conflict that the US inflicted on them.
This is coupled with a
massive drought that devastated
40% of their crops this year and a crippling
third wave of COVID-19.
The US should
release the $9.4 billion in Afghan funds held in American banks.
It should shift the
$6 billion allocated for the
now-defunct Afghan armed forces to humanitarian aid, instead of
diverting it to other forms of wasteful military spending. It
should encourage European allies and the
IMF not to withhold funds.
Instead, they should fully fund the UN 2021 appeal for
$1.3 billion in emergency aid,
which as of late August was less than 40% funded.
Rethinking Its Place
Once upon a time, the
United States helped its British and Soviet allies to defeat
Germany and Japan. The Americans then helped to rebuild them as
healthy, peaceful and prosperous countries. For all America’s
serious faults — its racism, its crimes against humanity in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its neocolonial relations with poorer
countries — it held up a promise of prosperity that people in
many countries around the world were ready to follow.
If all the United
States has to offer other countries today is the war, corruption
and poverty it brought to Afghanistan, then the world is wise to
be moving on and looking at other models to follow: new
experiments in popular and social democracy; a renewed emphasis
on national sovereignty and international law; alternatives to
the use of military force to resolve international problems; and
more equitable ways of organizing internationally to tackle
global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate
disaster.
The US can either
stumble on in its fruitless attempt to control the world through
militarism and coercion, or it can use this opportunity to
rethink its place in the world. Americans should be ready to
turn the page on our fading role as global hegemon and see how
we can make a meaningful, cooperative contribution to a future
that we will never again be able to dominate, but which we must
help to build.
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