I would say that I disagree with the author –– and I certainly do disagree, up to a point (I think the sudden withdrawal of troops, especially in the way it's been executed, has been disgraceful, disingenuous, amoral, and profoundly dangerous) –– but she has a very specific, firsthand perspective that I obviously can't remotely claim. And it's hard to argue directly with some of her (scathingly nihilistic) points.
On the other hand, the remarkable content of the video clip in this tweet does, in a sense, stand as an important, eloquent counter-argument to some of Jedeed's points.
From Jedeed's piece, this line in particular threw me for a loop:
"But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it’s our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet."
Is this last statement true?
I think it circles back to the quite murky question of intentions, and to what extent they ultimately matter vis à vis effects? I've been thinking, and arguing about, this conundrum a lot over the past week or so.
These are the (somewhat conflicting) conclusions I've come to (and of course I'm in no way a political scientist, just someone grappling with his own conscience while watching too much CNN and reading lots of news and op-ed articles):
1) Despite what it is disingenuously claimed now by Biden, Blinken, et al. (in order to spin/reframe this war as in some sense victorious), the US and its coalition partners obviously had some objectives in Afghanistan beyond eradicating al-Qaeda and finding bin-Laden and his immediate accomplices.
2) Furthermore, it is overly simplistic and perhaps even impossible to generalize about what "America" (and more so "the West") was really hoping to accomplish in Afghanistan, because in so doing one is lumping together four distinctly different executive administrations and many more different military commanders with certain visions for what constituted short- and long-term "success," as well as their secondary aims. And then there are the many thousands of individual soldiers, contractors, NGO workers, etc. who served in Afghanistan for some period of time in the past two decades. When one factors in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, etc. etc., the picture becomes even more complicated and resistant to broad generalization. Even if these states' first priorities were simply to make good on their NATO obligations and pragmatically demonstrate token solidarity with the more powerful US, they also had their own secondary priorities, also varying across multiple governments or administrations in twenty years.
Yet, having said all that, I'm going to generalize:
3) Democracy is good, and it is morally superior to any other sociopolitical form we've yet figured out and put into practice. A liberal, secular (at least semi-)democratic public sphere is a very good thing –– indeed, probably the single greatest achievement of the modern world.
4) Rights and opportunities for women are of paramount importance for any society, anywhere in the world, no matter its history or particular culture. Where threatened or embattled, those rights and opportunities must be defended and protected by all means available.
5) A basic education –– including the achievement of literacy and not limited to religious/scriptural studies –– is a universal human right, not a privilege. It should never be contingent on gender, religion, class or caste background. (A more advanced education should be too, but we remain quite far from achieving that ideal even in many so-called "highly developed" states.)
6) Whether as a direct or indirect consequence of US/coalition actions, Afghanistan had a marked, demonstrable increase in democratic participation (though by no means fully transparent or untainted by bureaucratic corruption) and in rights and opportunities for women and girls, particularly in terms of employment and education, including at the postsecondary and even postgraduate levels (see, e.g., the tweet linked to above). That is not nothing: a whole generation of Afghan females have enjoyed opportunities and relative protections on their basic human rights that – I think it is fair to say – they would never have had under the continuation of a Taliban-dominated government.
7) Even if some (many? most?) of the Western leaders and troops in Afghanistan were not most immediately concerned with promoting such universal rights (though, again, impossible to generalize about "Western" objectives/motives), their decisions, presence, and actions did facilitate these happy developments taking root and beginning to blossom.
8) Now, following the abrupt (morally irresponsible) withdrawal of Western troops and the rapid reconquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban, girls, women, and many others in Afghanistan will almost certainly have far fewer liberties, opportunities, and will suffer violence and oppression, probably to a very serious extent.
9) This is an absolute tragedy. But it does in itself negate the generation of females who have already acquired formidable knowledge, skills, and lives that they would not have otherwise possessed. Today's Taliban will have to reckon with a more substantial and resourceful women's-rights movement. They can kill individual people and attempt to impose severely restrictive laws, but they cannot totally cancel out years of social progress and its wide-ranging effects on Afghan society.
10) The decisions, presence, and actions (to say nothing of intentions) of US/coalition troops in Afghanistan also resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, including of al-Qaeda- and ISIS-connected terrorists, Western soldiers and contractors, Afghan soldiers, and civilians. Wikipedia gives the following totals (below); I have no idea how correct or timely these figures are – surely there have been some, probably many, unreported deaths – but it stands to reason that these numbers are at least approximately accurate.
| Casualties and losses |
|---|
Afghan security forces:
65,596+ killed[47][48]
Northern Alliance:
200 killed[49][50][51][52][53] Coalition:
Dead: 3,562 Wounded: 22,773 - United States: 19,950[55]
- United Kingdom: 2,188[56]
- Canada: 635[57]
Contractors
Dead: 3,937[58][59]
Wounded: 15,000+[58][59] Total killed: 73,295+ | Taliban: 51,000+ killed (no official numbers, incomplete according to Brown, can be higher)[47]
al-Qaeda: 2,000+ killed[43] | ISIL–KP: 2,400+ killed[27] |
Civilians killed: 47,245[47]
Total killed: 212,191+ (per UCDP)
| Uppsala Conflict Data ProgramThe UCDP's data is published annually in the Journal of Peace Research.[2] The UCDP also makes its data publicly... |
|
|
[60] |
11) In looking only at civilian deaths, this number (47,245), presumably, is higher than the number of civilians who would have been killed with the continuation of the Taliban-dominated status quo and non-involvement of Western states and their armies. How much higher, I have no idea, of course, and I doubt this can be even hypothetically quantified by a good statistician. Far too many contingencies over a twenty-year span.
12) Some amount of violent conflict/struggle and resulting mortality are something that the US and some other Western powers have (at times explicitly, at other times tacitly) accepted –– even celebrated, in certain cases –– as necessary for the achievement of greater rights and liberties and continued progress toward (at least ostensibly) a more democratic, just, and egalitarian society. Whether this "necessary sacrifice" equation and its built-in assumptions represent the right, or justifiable, or sometimes only (?) way to go about improving things in very meaningful ways, I really don't know...
13) Lastly, but perhaps most importantly: people – their lives, their freedoms, their opportunities for happiness – matter infinitely more than abstract entities like nation-states, international organizations, or corporations and their "interests" other than people.
