Skip to content
The World Can't Wait
Menu
  • Home
  • Events
  • About
    • About World Can’t Wait
      • History of World Can’t Wait
  • Projects
    • War Criminals Watch
    • We Are Not Your Soldiers!
    • Fire John Yoo
    • Sudan’s Struggle
  • Media
    • Audio
      • Video
    • Public Svc. Announcements
    • Press & Press Releases
      • Press Releases
      • Press Coverage
    • Photos
  • Take Action
    • Materials in English
    • Materials in Spanish
    • What You Can Do Now
    • Donate
    • More Resources
      • News & Analysis
        • Alternet
        • Antiwar.com
        • Black Agenda Report
        • Common Dreams
        • CounterPunch
        • Dissident Voice
        • Media Matters
        • Next Left Notes
        • OpEd News
        • Project Censored
        • Raw Story
        • Revolution Newspaper
        • Truthdig
        • Truthout
      • Anti-War
        • Afghans for Peace
        • Courage to Resist
        • Drone Warfare Awareness
        • Iraq Vets Against the War
        • Peace of the Action
        • Veterans for Peace
        • Voices for Creative Non-Violence
        • War is a Crime
      • Anti-Torture/Detention
        • Andy Worthington
        • Close Guantanamo
        • Free Detainees
        • Int’l Justice Network
        • No More Guantánamos
        • Religious Campaign Against Torture
        • Witness Against Torture
      • Political Repression
        • Bill of Rights Defense Committee
        • Center for Constitutional Rights
        • Committee to Stop FBI Repression
        • Drop the Charges on Gregory!
        • National Lawyers Guild
        • No Separate Justice
        • Project Salam
        • Stop Mass Incarceration
      • Women’s Rights/Theocracy
        • Defend Science
        • Feministing
        • RH Reality Check
        • Stop Patriarchy
        • Talk 2 Action
        • Theocracy Watch
        • Walk for Choice
      • Environment
        • Bill McKibben
        • Climate Connections
        • Enviros Against War
        • Grist
        • Tar Sands Action
  • En Español
Menu

U.S. Leaves After Helping Destroy Afghanistan

Posted on August 17, 2021
Share:
Debra Sweet | August 16, 2021

Twenty years after bombing its way into Afghanistan with the promise of ending Taliban rule, running al Qaeda out, and defending women’s rights there, the U.S. is scrambling to leave. The Afghan government, a creation of US fantasy, has collapsed; the Taliban is back in power. having accumulated most of the weapons the US littered the country with. Losses to the people of Afghanistan are incalculable, and in no way over.

NO ONE who is paying attention should be at all surprised, even though we remain outraged at the murderous US response to 9/11. The imperialist aims of the U.S. blind its leaders so that they are shocked when they don’t prevail.

What if we look at the situation as seen by those targeted by US invasion?

10 years ago, after 10 years of the American war on Afghanistan, the Afghan leader Malalai Joya toured the U.S. sponsored by World Can’t Wait and other anti-war groups. She spoke on why she opposes both the US occupation, and the Taliban, and accused the US of throwing backing and weapons to the US-backed warlords of the Northern Alliance who had also terrorized the people, and especially the Afghan women.

Ten days ago she was interviewed by The Independent identifying the American military as the root cause of many problems and a “cancer” to her country., “Get rid from my country. They are a cancer in the body of my society, in the body of my beloved country,” she says. “They are like Covid-19.”  “The catastrophic situation of women was a very good excuse for the US and Nato to occupy our country, and replace the barbaric regime of the Taliban with the warlords,” she said, and went on to explain that while some few projects in cities did help women, much of the money designated for such projects disappeared, and women outside the cities were left out.

Anand Gopal, who reported from inside Afghanistan for years, wrote a prize-winning book, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes. Interviewing a Taliban commander, a US backed warlord, and a woman caught between two sides, he shows how the combined ignorance and arrogance of US military planning made the failure of the U.S. occupation predictable from its beginning.

The 2001 attack on the people of Afghanistan was unjust, illegitimate, and immoral, and the takeaway lesson is NOT that the U.S. should have “stayed” this ugly course. We’ll have a lot more to say on this, but share this, posted on revcom.us recently:


U.S. Pullout from Afghanistan: Three Lessons and Two Basic Points of Orientation. In 2001, fanatical Islamic fundamentalists hijacked several airplanes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center, a massive office complex in New York. The center was destroyed and nearly 3,000 people were killed. They also attacked the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department. In response, the U.S., under Republican President George W. Bush, declared war against the government of Afghanistan, which had allowed the group that had done this—al Qaeda—to stay in their country. The Afghanistan government was headed by a fanatic and repressive Islamic fundamentalist group, the Taliban.

This qualitatively intensified a dynamic identified by Bob Avakian:

What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade [increasingly globalized western imperialism] on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these “outmodeds,” you end up strengthening both.

While this is a very important formulation and is crucial to understanding much of the dynamics driving things in the world in this period, at the same time we do have to be clear about which of these “historically outmodeds” has done the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity: It is the historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system, and in particular the U.S. imperialists. Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:28

The article concludes with two lessons:  One: People cannot allow themselves to be drawn into crusades by the imperialists in the name of supposedly ending one form of oppression while defending and strengthening another form of the same oppression. As the crucial quote from BA at the top of this article drives home, this is a bloody dynamic that only strengthens oppressive relations overall. And the only way to begin to break this dynamic is by firmly opposing one’s “own” imperialists when they launch any war, whatever their excuse.

Two: What we here in the imperialist countries must do is not only oppose these wars launched supposedly to implant “democracy,” but we must boldly instill in people everywhere a spirit of welcoming the defeats of these oppressors in trying to carry out these vicious schemes.

See latest post of Monday August 16 from revcom.us
As the Taliban Take Over Afghanistan and America Is Driven Out in Defeat…WHERE DO THE INTERESTS OF HUMANITY LIE?


A closing message from Malalai Joya: “We are the ones with the responsibility to be fearless, to be tireless, to be more active, to work for the other people and to lead them in the right direction.”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Because humanity & the planet come first...
store
Don’t stop… Don’t conciliate... Don’t accommodate... Don’t collaborate... and support World Can't Wait.

Sign up for email

Stop FBI Repression
Know your rights
If An Agent Knocks

About

World Can't Wait mobilizes people living in the United States to stand up and stop war on the world, repression and torture carried out by the US government. We take action, regardless of which political party holds power, to expose the crimes of our government, from war crimes to systematic mass incarceration, and to put humanity and the planet first.

Read More

Subscribe to E-Newsletter

Contact World Can't Wait

TOPICS

  • Afghanistan & Pakistan
  • Covert Drone War
  • Crimes are Crimes
  • Culture of Bigotry
  • Environment
  • G.I. Resistance
  • Haiti
  • Immigrants
  • Iran
  • Iraq
  • Libya
  • Mass Incarceration
  • Obama
  • Occupy
  • Palestine
  • Police State Repression
  • Real History Lessons
  • Reproductive Rights
  • Reports on Protest & Resistance
  • Theocracy
  • Torture
  • Wikileaks
  • Calls to Action
  • The Expanding War on the World

Projects

  • War Criminals Watch
  • We Are Not Your Soldiers
  • Get Involved

  • Donate
  • Download filters, stickers and posters
  • More ways to get involved
  • ©2025 The World Can't Wait | Design: Newspaperly WordPress Theme