The warmakers passing as the “foreign policy establishment” will try to push us back into open conflict.
It began as it always seems to, with some entrenched stakeholder in the foreign policy establishment solemnly invoking their idea of The Right Thing To Do. “[B]ottom line is that our work is not done in Afghanistan,” said former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta during a CNN appearance on August 27. “I know we’ll be removing our troops by a certain date, but the bottom line is our work is not done…. We’re going to have to go back in to get ISIS.” Twenty years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, these people still think flapping “our work is not done” remains a viable argument for the Forever War, i.e. the so-called “war on terror.” Even after getting battered for days with images of the mayhem at Kabul airport, American opinion remains solidly against continuing our failed war in Afghanistan, which has prompted the stay-forever advocates to ramp up the volume. “The chance of another 9/11 just went through the roof,” announced Lindsey Graham as he twirled the old, bloody shirt. “This is one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history, much worse than Saigon,” snarled Mitch McConnell with brazen incoherence; does he think we should still be fighting the Vietnam War? “It’s been a catastrophe and I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse,” opined alpha warmonger John Bolton. Even Donald Trump, who ran for president on withdrawing from Afghanistan and brokered the deal that led to this mess, dropped in his two cents. “This is not a withdrawal,” he howled at a rally in Cullman, Alabama. “This was a total … surrender.” In their haste to reactivate the war-profit ATM and trillion-dollar mineral/gas rights bonanza that is and has been Afghanistan, our pals in the establishment have either glossed over or gruesomely perverted a few pertinent facts. First and foremost, the Taliban clearly perpetrates horrific violence, repression, and misogyny… but they also despise the Islamic State and ISIS-K (or “ISIS-X,” as Trump named them the other day when he flubbed the teleprompter again). Beyond cultural and religious differences is the fact that members of ISIS (also known as Daesh), like al-Qaeda, want to violently spread their influence worldwide. Allowing al-Qaeda to do so bought the Taliban 20 years of war and a prolonged near-death experience. They have not forgotten the lesson. The Taliban were furious over the Kabul airport bombing, just as they were unhappy with the 9/11 attacks. They want to make Afghanistan into their own far-right religious fascist arena, and are not interested in going beyond their borders. When ISIS or al-Qaeda start murdering citizens of other countries within their borders and without, it messes with their plans. Because of this, it is not a reach to conclude that the best people to “get ISIS” are the ones who are already there. This decision would not be unprecedented. An earlier phase of the war in Afghanistan bore witness to “an all-out military challenge by the Islamic State to the Taliban’s supremacy as Afghanistan’s Islamist guerrilla force,” according to Graeme Wood of The Atlantic. “These two factions fought a war — and even though the Taliban had a decades-long head start, the competition was a close one in certain areas, particularly eastern Afghanistan. The U.S. intervened to help the Taliban.” It’s a bleak option, the very idea of considering the Taliban to be some sort of ally in this specific struggle. By doing so, we would be giving tacit endorsement to their nascent government, and through that, endorsement to the various shades of hell they will almost certainly inflict on civilians, particularly women.
