#93 The Middle East and The War on Terror
Nowhere in the world is the argument I made in the last blog about Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo made clearer than in central Asia, termed the Middle East among the Western nations. The four nations of Afghanistan, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Libya under Colonel Gaddafi, and Syria under Bassar al Assad, were all in their own way attempting to develop their societies by the year 2000. All four had their faults; but all four nations were ‘progressing' on the criterion of development - in popular education, development of infrastructure and industries. As everyone knows, all four were overtly invaded by different variations of the US-led military machine, often alongside proxy forces. Their cities were laid waste, and their people fled in such large numbers that they have created an invasion of refugees throughout Europe to the degree that the EU has become destabilised.
Again, if we look up, we can see the gigantic American war machine in action against any nation that has attempted to develop their own peoples outside the market mechanism beloved by USA advisors.
For the last 40 years, Afghanistan has known war and the other three nations for lesser years, but this has been sufficient to overthrow stable governments, flatten cities, and impoverish people on a grand scale. No other part of the world has suffered such invasions, so we need to ask: why?
Laying Countries to Waste
Each invasion has been publicly justified thus:
Afghanistan in 2001, due to the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York of that year
Iraq was said to have had weapons of mass destruction, which was proved false.
Libya, due to Colonel Gaddafi's poor behaviour
Syria, to protect the people against her own leader
Additionally, each invasion was justified under the aegis of the 'global war on terror'. The leaders of each country were publicly and personally denigrated in the Western press. Many of the explanations for the invasions have since proved to be partially or wholly inaccurate. During these invasions, all cities in these countries were thoroughly bombed, and as we’ve seen this has created a mass refugee crisis.
The Western analysis of the refugee crises has failed systematically to connect the movement of people to their own activities of invasion. The sheer volume of people’s movements in the 21st century is not dissimilar to the mass movements of people across Europe after 1945. On this occasion, the surge of refugees into Europe was a deep embarrassment to nearly all the governments. They have had little idea how to handle this new surge, except to build walls to keep them out.
Something similar was happening on the Mexico/US border where a surge of refugees was seeking entry to the USA. In this case, the USA has been attempting to build a wall.
Politicians were behaving badly; there was little attempt either in the USA or in the European Union to connect the refugees to the invasions that they themselves had carried out. In the 40 years after 1960, the USA had repressed every movement in Central America that attempted to develop their people and resources because they were socialist. The consequences are poverty, disease, hunger, and escape.
As this blog is written, the refugee issue upends the politics of both Europe and the USA. Little or no attempt is made to connect the floods of refugees to the invasions and laying of waste in the countries from which they come. Ideas for reconstruction are simply absent. To provide one key example of what 'laying waste' has meant in the 21st century, we will provide a brief account of the events in Afghanistan. Every part of the world that has been laid waste has its own peculiarities; the Central American countries, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and a range of others are all different. Equally, they are all the same: they have all incurred the wrath of the most powerful nation on earth, the USA, and they have been bombed and invaded, with little attempt to end the invasions and reconstruct the country.
To illustrate how the floods of refugees and the devastation of a land and its people have become, perhaps, the greatest challenge to the maintenance of the American empire and the stability of the Western world in the 21st century, we shall use just one important example: Afghanistan.
The Afghan Wars and Empire
The people of Afghanistan have been constantly at war for around 40 continuous years. It began as a civil war in the 1970s. Here is the framework of Afghanistan at war:
1973: King Zahir Shah was overthrown in a coup headed by Daoud Khan who was supported by armed forces
Daoud ruled from 1973 to 1978 in collaboration with the USSR.
1978: The Communist Party of Afghanistan overthrew Daoud who was killed in a civil war where it was said 100,000 people died and invited the USSR into Afghanistan for support.
1979: The USA, supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, arranged the invasion of Afghanistan through a collection of radical Islamic fighters.
1989: The USSR was defeated and retired back to Russia and from then the Taliban took control until 2001.
The USA began a full-scale invasion in 2001; they overthrow The Taliban who managed to retreat. The Americans remained there until they were overthrown by a new set of Taliban fighters in 2021. The Americans were defeated by a nationalist force of local men. You will not be surprised that the USA left Afghanistan in dire poverty and famine.
Since the early 1980s, Afghan refugees have been spilling into neighbouring countries, mainly Pakistan and Iran. The above is a brief outline of the invasions and Afghanistan at war. The story of the overthrow of a monarchy to industrialise will be familiar to readers of these blogs. But that was not what happened in this case. The Cold War and the opportunity to hit the USSR in Afghanistan was too much for the hard men in the CIA in Washington to resist.
The Mujahedeen was a sponsored army, carefully planned and carried forward. The Americans provided the money, training, and armoury for 250,000 young idealistic, anti-communist militant young Islamic men from central Asia to invade and attack the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The secret services in Pakistan had provided safe passage, and Saudi Arabia had offered their financial recruitment services.
The Americans then began a full-scale invasion of their own in 2001 and they have never left until they were recently defeated militarily. The USA has always had hugely greater firepower than their opponents, the Taliban. But the Taliban were the indigenous peoples with a memory and long history of fighting from the 1830s to rid the country of invaders. They were willing to use guerrilla tactics derived from Mao's victory in China. The Americans might have learnt from their Vietnam War that people with a long cultural history can take more losses in order to rid their country of invaders. Afghanistan’s idea of freedom has always been, first and foremost, to be rid of outsiders.
By 2010 it was clear to many that the Afghan invasion was unwinnable. There were by then around 100,000 US military forces inside the country, 30,000 NATO Military forces and 100,000 private contractors
The Americans were suffering on their own side; tens of thousands of men were killed, hundreds of thousands of men severely injured but still alive, and soldiers with post-traumatic stress and suicide rates 5 or 6 times higher than others of the same ages. On the Afghan side, the numbers killed are apparently unknown; the civilian causalities have been very high. By 2010, they had one of the largest refugee numbers across the world, not to mention the internally displaced peoples.
The costs of the war for the Americans are reported to be around $700 billion over 17 years, ranging from $50 to $100 billion a year. The major question is: why did the US side not pull back before they were routed? Everything they have tried had failed. A careful retreat would have been the mature and obvious option. But the Americans were contemptuous of the local fighters and stayed until they were driven out.
There are tens of thousands of men and women whose careers depended on America being at war. The Pentagon has extended its employment to a huge number of people administrating the war. Hundreds of buildings exist to serve the war machine; there are contracting firms, defence corporations, banks and apartment complexes that have arisen to serve US wars around the world. All make a substantial living. Washington DC as a city has benefited from the employment of people involved in the war. This is money that sustains and underlines the war.
In Afghanistan itself, the Americans had arrived with aid in their pockets which the Taliban were able to obtain. The Americans spend up to $5 billion a year on propaganda, recruiting public relations firms, journalists, and psychological operations to appear to the world’s public to be winning. They argue that they bring ‘progress’. $130 billion has been spent on reconstruction (more, in real terms, than was spent on Europe in 1948 in the Marshall Plan). This is money often overtly stolen by Afghan officials. The freedom for women and girls is often claimed, plus life expectancy rises but is without foundation; the ongoing war made progress near impossible.
The elections were often boycotted or suffered from vote theft on a monumental scale. Only the drug trade has thrived. The most senior Afghan men in government-owned poppy-growing land. One of the biggest drug barons was President Karzai's brother. Afghan military planes are known to transport the drugs out of Afghanistan. The poppy eradication programme offered $10 million in cash to governors who succeeded in removing a certain level of their crop: ideal for removing competitors.
Torture had become routine in Afghan jails; child sex slaves too became normal. The global war on terror in Afghanistan has increased the number of people willing to oppose the USA. The numbers and character of the Taliban and their sister organisations have increased over the last 20 years in the form of Al Qaeda and ISIS. It is not difficult to see that the USA strategy of unending war has been and remains a failure.
The above account is a brief summary of American policy toward the Middle East and the War on Terror. What it shows is that the people’s lives have been devastated: that the post-1945 type of global crisis has been repeated in new forms in the 21st century. The USA, alongside its European allies, continues to use its power to destroy Afghanistan, and here we could add all the countries across the Middle East and North Africa. It ought to be clear by now that there can be no conclusion to the turbulence in our own societies in Europe, or to the end of the risings of Al Qaeda or ISIS, not only until these wars are stopped, but until these societies begin to be rebuilt. A re-examination of the Development Banks in Japan and Germany would be a good start.
Suggested Reading
You are spoilt for choice here. The western powers have been involved with Afghan affairs since the 1830s. For the last 50 years there is a wealth of literature:
John Cooley's, Unholy Wars, Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, Pluto Books, (2002).
Ahmed Rashid, The Power of Militant Islam in Afghanistan, I B Tauris (2010).
Jason Burke, The True Story of Radical Islam, I.B Tauris, (2007).
Lucy Morgan Edwards, The Afghan Solution, The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, The CIA and How Western Hubris Lost Afghanistan, Bactria Press, (2011).
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The peoples of Western Europe had risen from one world of relative poverty and had learnt how to take the wealth from the Americas and transfer it to their own countries. This was slavery and latterly until 1920, indentureship. A whole set up of banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies had arisen to make these transfers possible. From the 1750s the European invaders turned their attention to Asia and systematically began the colonisation process anew. At the same time, as they attempted to colonise and extract the wealth of Asia, the colonising countries began the process we now recognise as industrialisation alongside the rapid growth of cities. The surplus resources extracted through colonisation were used to finance the growth of new industries.