On September 29th 2021, the International Affairs department presented a talk in response to the U.S.’ abrupt departure from Afghanistan, a country they undoubtedly fractured. The event’s panelists were Skidmore Professors Yelena Biberman-Ocakli, Gwen D’Arcangelis, Pushkala Prasad, and Jonathan Lohnes from Cornell University. Professor Mahesh Shankar was the moderator. While the panel's goal was to fill in the gaps of information about the Afghanistan war, this discussion also explained the causes that led to this man-made tragedy, and the long term consequences of the U.S. invasion.
This departure had grave implications. On August 27th, videos of desperate Afghans trying to flee the country by climbing onto the wheels of an American aircraft circulated the internet, shocking the U.S. and the world. Professor Biberman highlighted that this should not have happened, and it especially should not have happened for 20 long years.
Negotiations have taken place between the CIA and the Taliban, but these talks were cut short by the U.S., and the fact that this was a rushed invasion, as well as a rushed retreat. Biberman alluded to The Afghanistan Papers, a set of military and state government reports about the U.S.’ operations in Afghanistan. “We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invaded violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan,” said James Dobbins, former U.S. Ambassador.
This quote underscores the failures of the U.S., and how the American grand strategy has repeatedly put the lives of Afghan civilians and U.S. personnel alike at risk in the name of profit. Professor Prasad also emphasized that the fact that the region of Afghanistan sits on “a treasure trove of copper and lithium” most definitely played a role in the American exploitation of the country for profit.
To see the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as purely a “War on Terrorism” would be misleading, as there are many other causes that made Afghanistan a region of interest for the US. The panelists raised an interesting statistic about U.S. media coverage of Afghanistan. In the year 2020, there was only a total of 7 minutes of coverage by media outlets like CNN, MSNBC and BBC. However, on the day of the retreat, coverage increased to about 7 hours, gaining more attention than ever.
A key point from the panel is that the goal of the occupation was counter-terrorism, rather than nation-building. U.S. occupation could never result in the stability of Afghanistan, especially after taking into account the tumultuous historical relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan.
Professor D’Archangelis reminded us that we cannot underscore the role of imperial feminism, in the role of the U.S. invasion. U.S. feminists have played a significant part in supporting the U.S. invasion into Afghanistan through the rhetoric of “saving women” from the misogynist, conservative occupation of the Taliban. However, what people forget is the role that the U.S. and the Soviet Union played in the creation of the Taliban and the armament of Al-Qaeda. With that in mind, the rhetoric of the U.S. needing to “save Afghan women” must be taken with some skepticism. Women like Nancy Bush and Eleanor Smeal, though their feminist language can be very different, find their reason for U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the need to back the U.S.’ military regime disguised as “peacekeeping” in the region.
Though this sentiment may have held some weight with regards to urban women in Afghanistan who had their rights stripped away, it highlights the white saviour complex, especially for countries in the Global South. The ‘white saviour complex’ refers to when a white person provides help to a non-white person or community in a self-serving manner. The U.S. has adapted feminist-sounding language to justify the invasion. However as Professor D’Archangelis emphasised bombing a country is not safe for women or in fact, anyone. What the U.S. has been doing under the guise of feminism is backing its military regime and justifying the invasion. What Professor D’Archangelis pushes for, in this scenario, is transnational feminism, which is to reject the superficial attention to women and women’s rights, to recognise the fact that the US is culpable with the violence in Afghanistan, and calls for global solidarity which is to offer support, rather than saviourism.
With the background and intentions set in place, Professor Prasad further explains the impact that the U.S. invasion has on the Afghan people, who overwhelmingly bore the costs of the war. She breaks down the endangered Afghan populations into two categories: the hyper vulnerable, and the exposed.
While the exposed, which are people in secondary danger from the Taliban, could move into the hyper vulnerable category, the hyper vulnerable face immediate harm and danger in the Taliban regime. These people often include Afghan civilians with close links to the U.S. armed forces and private military contractors, people with second degree connections to the U.S. and western allies, the administration and staff of NATO and NGOs, journalists and activists, even ethnic religious minorities like the Hazaris, Tajiks and Sikhs.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has left millions of people displaced, under immediate harm and oftentimes killed. It is important for us to realize that the “refugee crisis” after and during the Afghan war is a completely man-made crisis. Europe, who has historically recognized themselves as the “vanguards of human rights,” have been resistant to accepting Afghan refugees due to racist and xenopohic reactions of the European people. Even if they have been very committed to soft power, which is power without force, like taking in and protecting refugees, we see a decline in that acceptance, Professor Prasad explained.
The U.S. has one of the tightest refugee policies in the Western world. The Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), which is a visa that can be obtained by Afghans who have directly provided help to the US army and government, could keep people who need help in a complex immigration procedure that often fails to accommodate their family members.
If Europe rejects Afghan refugees and the U.S.’ immigration procedures fail to protect Afghans, due to Afghanistan’s geographical location, the likely reality is for these refugees to travel by foot into neighboring countries. This is a sad story, because they often have illegal entry through various land borders into Iran and Pakistan.
Iran and Pakistan are two countries that fall on different sides of the coin with regards to U.S. aid. While Pakistan is a beneficiary of U.S. monetary aid, Iran has been subject to embargo, which makes the situation very difficult. The most jarring thing about this situation is the rise of disaster capitalism, which is where people and corporations make profit out of suffering, in this case, from the suffering of refugees. People like Eric Prince have security companies that offer people money to take people out of Afghanistan, awarding over six thousand dollars per person.
While Afghanistan has been popularly called “the graveyard of empires”, the current situation in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to the idea of the geography and territory being the sole reasons for why the US lost the war. It is important to question who actually won, as there is clear suffering occuring in Afghanistan now due to them bearing the brunt of the costs of the war. The roles of the West cannot be denied in installing and funding the violent fundamentalist Islamists. Overall, this panel was extremely enlightening, and it further emphasized the role that citizens have in explaining and understanding the implications of the Afghanistan war. However, we also need to consider the impact that the US’ retreat has on the world as a whole. Where do we stand on the international stage now that we know that much of that blood is on our hands? How could we be better in preventing something like this to happen again? Another invasion is not the answer, for sure. However, these questions cannot be answered in the span of a two hour panel, and these questions are ones that we need to keep in mind as we go along into the future.