What if we gave a retreat and nobody noticed? That seems to be the situation in Afghanistan, where Secretary of State Michael Pompeo recently made a flying visit to tell the locals to shape the fuck up before Uncle Sam got pissed, or as the Washington Post put it: “U.S. vows to cut $1 billion in aid to Afghanistan as political crisis threatens peace deal”.
There is a bit of a dispute in Afghanistan over who is president, Ashraf Ghani or Abdullah Abdullah. Ghani has the title, but Abdullah has a lot of backers, many of them with guns, who said that Ghani “won” the recent election, held last September, via massive fraud. The point is, unless the two reach a working agreement, it will be impossible for the Afghans to do anything important, like, for example, negotiating with the Taliban, so that the U.S. can, you know, get the fuck out of Afghanistan.
“The United States is disappointed in them [Ghani and Abdullah] and what their conduct means for Afghanistan and our shared interests," Secretary Pompeo said in a statement, which if not swaggering was certainly undiplomatic. "Their failure has harmed U.S.-Afghan relations and, sadly, dishonors those Afghan, Americans, and Coalition partners who have sacrificed their lives and treasure in the struggle to build a new future for this country.”
It isn’t “unusual” for the U.S. to want peace more than the leaders of the country we’re ostensibly “saving”. This happened in both Korea1 and Vietnam. What’s “interesting”, of course, is that the “right” doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about this shameful display of weakness on Uncle Sam’s part—no lectures on how we’re destroying U.S. “credibility” around the world—almost as if abandoning a failed policy were a good idea instead of a shameful one!
Afterwords
While the Trump administration is slipping out of Afghanistan almost unnoticed—because no one wants to look—it is ratcheting up its brutal harassment of Iran even more, as the American Conservative’s Daniel Larison keeps reminding us:
Broad sectoral sanctions that strangle a country’s economy can only be intended to harm and punish the population as a whole. Depriving the most vulnerable people in a country of access to essential medicine and cutting off the supply of ingredients that their own pharmaceutical companies need to produce their own drugs are the predictable and inevitable consequences of seeking to isolate and penalize an entire nation. This policy is indiscriminate by design and it hurts the poorest and sickest individuals hardest. This was true long before the outbreak, but the pandemic has shone a bright light on just how iniquitous our government’s use of sanctions really is. Like a siege, economic war saps a country’s resources, lowers the population’s resistance to disease, and deprives them of access to vital necessities, but it does so on a much grander scale and instead of trying to starve a fortress or city into submission it seeks to starve a state with tens of millions of people.
The Clinton administration sadly bought into the wholesale use of sanctions as a “bloodless” (for the U.S.) way of satisfying the right-wing demand for a “tough” foreign policy, really as an end in itself, and to justify our grossly overbuilt military, which the American people have sadly and unthinkingly insisted on supporting at the polls. Almost no one in the U.S. cares about the suffering we inflict on other nations, no one thinks that other nations might resent our endless bullying and oppression. They call us the “Great Satan”! How crazy is that? It is crazy, isn’t it?
For more on right-wing/neocon hypocrisy on Afghanistan (lots more), go here.
1. I discussed President Eisenhower’s struggles to get the heck out of the Korean War in a recent piece largely concerned with the question of whether Ike had actually threatened the communists with the atomic bomb as a way of cudgeling them to the bargaining table. Poor Ike found South Korean President Syngman Rhee almost as recalcitrant as the communists, because Rhee wanted the U.S. to unite all of Korea under his rule.
Does Trump want to get out of Afghanistan in order to look like a big shot? Is he doing it surreptitiously?