Afghanistan Shenanigans

by Caitlin Johnstone - 16 Aug 2021  

Things have been moving very rapidly as Taliban forces immediately closed in on Kabul after the end of the occupation. The US is frantically evacuating people, former Afghan officials are fleeing the country, and a transition to Taliban control is a done deal.

It’s long been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Taliban would regain control of the country when occupying western powers withdrew, but I don’t think anyone would’ve put money on it happening this quickly. A few interesting questions have come up about this, like for example how hilarious would it be if after spending twenty years and trillions of dollars and thousands of human lives “fighting the Taliban”, the Taliban suddenly resumed power as a US puppet regime?

I mean, what’s going on here?

And here?

And here?

I’m not the first person to speculate about this:

And this all comes just months after the Taliban renewed its earlier pledge to guarantee safety to a trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline, which many like journalist Whitney Webb have suggested was a major reason for the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place.

So who knows what’s going on, but it wouldn’t be surprising if shenanigans were afoot in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile this all has a lot of people outing themselves as believers in benevolent imperialism, with many westerners across the political spectrum arguing that the US needs to continue its military occupation in perpetuity to protect women’s rights.

It is now suddenly the wokest of feminisms to want an empire whose interventionism is literally always disastrous to re-invade Afghanistan and occupy their land for generations and keep murdering anyone who tries to fight back in order to force them all to espouse our white liberal values.

Exactly zero of the shitlibs demanding troops stay to prevent Taliban rule at gunpoint would fight the Taliban themselves. Exactly zero of them would even be willing kill Taliban forces sitting miles away safely piloting a drone. This is a game to them. A complete abstraction. I mean, can you picture Marianne Williamson charging at Taliban forces firing an M4 carbine? I can’t.


Maybe, just maybe, it was dumb to believe the invasion of Afghanistan ever had anything to do with helping women in the first place? The US military is the very last institution on earth who’d ever actually do anything in the interests of humanitarianism and the very last institution you’d ever want to.

No matter what exactly is happening in Afghanistan, everything you’re seeing there today is the fault of the US-centralized oligarchic empire. Every little bit of it. Not just starting with the insane 2001 invasion which cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives but long before it, when US government agencies backed the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the eighties and actively radicalized them. This entire mess is the result of a bunch of imperialists deciding that the entire planet needs to be dominated by a single power structure and that it’s fine to play with human lives like chess pieces in order to make that happen.

These bastards are going to keep murdering people around the world while robbing and oppressing their own citizenry at home until their fingers can be pried off of the world’s steering wheel for good. Only then will we ever have a chance at creating a healthy world.


Featured image via Sam Shepherd,(CC BY 3.0 NZ)


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