by This was not just a botched exit by Biden, but a stunning failure of US imperialism to build any economic or social roots on the ground — after 20 years of occupation.
By Rosemary Dodd
The world has been aghast at the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan as the withdrawal of US troops resulted in a large-scale collapse of the US-backed Afghan government. The Taliban rapidly advanced from holding several regional provinces to capturing Kabul and declaring themselves the new government on August 15. Although the takeover itself was surprisingly bloodless due to large swaths of the Afghan military laying down their arms in surrender, heart-wrenching images of terrified refugees and desperate Afghans at the Kabul airport (including some who fell to their deaths after clinging to a US plane), have underscored just how dire the situation is for many in the country.
The Taliban, who were forced to renounce power and quickly melt away after the initial US invasion in 2001, have come back significantly stronger than before after two decades of battling an occupying superpower, which allowed them to grow support and develop savvier military and economic tactics. Although they claim they will respect women’s rights and not seek reprisals against those who assisted the US-backed government, there is little evidence that this “new” Taliban will be fundamentally different from its former repressive, conservative regime.
The 20-year US war has cost over $2 trillion, the lives of almost 2,500 US troops, around 170,000 Afghan lives, and the displacement of over four million people. The Afghani death toll is often listed as an afterthought in US media, but the people of Afghanistan have paid an unthinkable price for this war in blood, trauma, and economic hardship. Every single one of these lives were spent for nothing, as the obscenely corrupt Afghan government proved to be a house of cards waiting to fall as soon as US troops withdrew.
Elite Panic
The vast majority of the media — from liberal to right-wing outlets — turned on Biden over the withdrawal, playing footage of chaos in Kabul on repeat and trotting out war criminals like John Bolton to argue that we should stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. Of course, the images and tales of human suffering absolutely deserve to be highlighted. But these are the same individuals and news outlets that consistently ignored or downplayed the atrocities committed against civilians by US airstrikes and US allies in the region. Rather than genuine humanitarian concern, this is a defense of endless war profiteering by military contractors and anger at Biden for revealing the shortcomings of US imperialism. There has been pushback from Western powers as well; at the behest of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the G7 convened to plead with Biden to extend the withdrawal past the August 31 deadline.
Despite their hand-wringing over the plight of Afghan women and girls, few capitalist commentators are pointing out how the vast majority of rural women under the US-backed regime still suffered gender oppression with the additional burden of war and airstrikes. As Adam Nossiter writes in the New York Times, “Afghanistan, particularly in its urban centers, may have changed over 20 years of American occupation. But the laws the Taliban promoted — repressive policies toward women — were not so different, if they differed at all, from immemorial customs in many of these rural villages.” Additionally, figures demonstrating education for girls were exaggerated — as of 2017, only around a third of girls were attending school. The majority of the capitalist media are not mentioning the devastation caused by the war itself, nor are they arguing for a massive refugee program to alleviate this suffering.
Blaming Biden for the way the withdrawal turned out is an attempt by the ruling class and its media to do damage control — if Biden simply botched the exit, then it was tactical mistakes at the end that are to blame for what we’re seeing now rather than the entire war that lasted through four different presidents. They realize how deeply delegitimizing this defeat is for US institutions, and how it reveals the structural weakness of a declining superpower that couldn’t mold Afghanistan despite a 20-year occupation. Additionally, both Republican and Democratic elites want to keep the option of starting these kinds of wars in the future.
They claimed after 9/11 that the answer to right-wing Islamic terrorism was invasion, and that the US was “helping” the people of Afghanistan as well as keeping Americans safe. Today, the lie is laid bare, another crack in the already unstable foundation of the ruling class’s legitimacy. As socialists, we unequivocally support withdrawing from Afghanistan and ending all other occupations and imperialist wars.
A Stunning Failure
The Taliban swept to victory not due to any broad popular support but because they were able to step into a vacuum left by the widely hated puppet government the US set up. According to a 2019 Asia Foundation survey, only 13 percent of Afghans “have a lot or a little sympathy with the Taliban.” The regime of the Taliban was not popular and could not put up much resistance 20 years ago when the US first invaded. The fact that they succeeded so quickly and easily now is a stunning indictment of the failures of US imperialism.
The deal with the Taliban to withdraw US troops was initially brokered under Trump, who, like Obama before him, ran on getting the US out of Afghanistan and ending endless wars. Instead, under both administrations we saw troop “surges” rather than drawdowns. Amazingly, Trump criticized Biden for following through with his plan, and Chris Miller, Trump’s final Secretary of Defense, even claimed that the Trump Administration had no intention of actually leaving, instead using the deal with the Taliban as a “play” to manipulate Afghan President Asraf Ghani.
Despite the assurances that the Afghan government was ready to carry on the fight alone, it was an open secret there was no long-term strategy, and most foreign policy experts thought a Taliban victory was inevitable. What was shocking was the speed with which the government fell. Ghani fled in a helicopter, and large swaths of the military laid down their weapons rather than fighting the Taliban’s inevitable advance, giving the US no time to quietly withdraw its civilian presence and save some measure of face.
Biden has dismissively blamed the Afghans for refusing to fight for their own country: “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.” But what exactly would they be fighting and giving their lives for? A foreign-funded government so corrupt it could enrich its top officials and contractors but not provide the most basic services to its people? While it would be inaccurate to paint the Afghan government and the Taliban as equivalent, the fact remains that after 20 years of occupation the puppet regime was not able to offer any prospect of economic and social development to the masses and was not able to build popular support.
Echoes of Vietnam
In July, Joe Biden said “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.” Here he was referencing the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon upon the fall of the US-backed government in South Vietnam. Images of the helicopter leaving the roof of the embassy in Kabul as smoke poured out the windows from hastily burned classified documents made it clear: this is another Vietnam moment for US imperialism.
In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, the US invested a massive amount of resources in “nation building,” causing untold suffering for the inhabitants, only to be humiliated when those governments crumbled. Both times, the US painted an overly rosy picture of the state of the wars, but the opposition forces (the North Vietnamese and Taliban, respectively), refused to back down and embarked on drawn-out, seemingly uphill battles to ultimate victory. In both cases the local allies the US relied on for support were corrupt with little public backing and were unable to function without foreign military support.
Imperial occupations that prop up domestic corruption and cronyism but offer little to nothing in the way of economic opportunity or political self-determination cannot build a social and economic base for a puppet regime.
There are also major differences between the US interventions in Vietnam and Afghanistan. While the Taliban regime was not popular and lacked deep roots in society, the hopes of millions in Vietnam to abolish capitalism and develop society along the lines of the Stalinist USSR were a real factor in the resistance against US imperialism. Vitally, the wars were fought in very different ways. While 58,000 working-class American soldiers (over 30 percent of whom were drafted) died fighting their brothers and sisters in Vietnam, the Afghan war relied heavily on proxies and unmanned drones.
Since the historic defeat in Vietnam, the willingness of the US working class to carry the burden of these imperialist wars collapsed. The ruling class tried to carefully rebuild this willingness over the ensuing decades, and happily used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade multiple countries. However, public support for foreign military intervention, even with few troops on the ground, took a hit after the US defeat in Iraq, and it took an even deeper blow with the unraveling of efforts in Afghanistan. Future anti-war movements can use this as ammunition.
A History of Failed Interventions
Afghanistan is merely the latest in a series of failed military interventions in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Vietnam. For decades, direct US intervention was the norm, supported (to varying degrees) by both the Republican and Democratic parties. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 90 percent of the country supported invading Afghanistan, and Barbara Lee was the sole oppositional vote in Congress.
Biden has been an active player in this bipartisan war machine. Biden is neither a pacifist nor a non-interventionist. He supported US military interventions in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Syria among many others. Jeremy Scahill writes in The Intercept that Biden “is dedicated to the US as an empire, [and] believes that preserving US national interests and ‘prestige’ on the global stage outweighs considerations of morality or even at times the deaths of innocent people.” However, at least since his stint as Vice President under Obama, he has been forcefully agitating behind the scenes to withdraw from Afghanistan. He opposed the troop surge, and in his memoir, Obama recalls that Biden tried to convince him not to listen to the generals, saying “Don’t let them jam you.”
While he repeats the popular talking points about not sending another generation of Americans to die in an unending, unwinnable war, Biden also hints at another reason to pull out. At a press conference, he claimed that the US´s competitors in Beijing and Moscow would “love nothing more” than for the US to be “bogged down” in Afghanistan. Biden, like Trump before him, has been talking up the threat China poses to US hegemony. In defending his proposed withdrawal from Afghanistan in April against Republican Representative Liz Cheney, Trump claimed she “wants to stay in the Middle East and Afghanistan for another 19 years, but doesn’t consider the big picture — Russia and China!” There appears to be at least a section of the US ruling class that sees this particular type of nation building as a distraction from the inter-imperialist rivalry with China and Russia, which they consider of primary importance, especially in this period of declining geopolitical power and prestige for US capitalism.
US imperialism is no longer powerful enough to directly reshape the world in its image, and Biden represents a wing of the ruling class that understands that and wants to pivot strategically. Other sections are in denial and want to cling to old ways of doing things, fearful of the impact this defeat will have on US imperialism´s standing in the world.
A Turning Point for US Imperialism
The failures in Afghanistan deal a blow not only to US hard power but to its soft power as well. If direct military intervention failed so dramatically, the threat of future such interventions holds less sway, and other nations will have less incentive to accept US political domination.
This has repercussions for the US domestically, too. The idea of “American exceptionalism” and the US’s position as the supposed leader of “the free world” has been used to economically and morally justify the rule of the ruling class within the US. The obvious weakening of its position internationally will increase uncertainty in its fitness to rule domestically and cause working-class Americans to seek alternatives on both the right and the left. Right and left strains that question militarized imperialism can be seen in the rapid growth of both DSA and the Trump-adjacent “America first” right.
Despite Biden saying he bears “no responsibility” for the humanitarian crisis, the predicament faced by people in Afghanistan is the direct result of failed US imperial policy that Biden supported for decades. Socialists are fighting for a massively expanded refugee program, including humane resettlement and jobs programs for those fleeing Afghanistan. Of course, this holds true for other countries ravaged by military and climate emergencies as well, such as Yemen, Syria, and Haiti. It is a false choice between helping immigrants and improving conditions for the US working class — the US has the resources for living wages, housing, and education for all if we redistribute even a portion of the accumulated wealth of the rich and corporations. Just the top .01 percent in the US has a staggering 11 percent of its wealth.
We reject the imperialist warmongers and their arguments that the most humane approach is to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. The withdrawal (beyond the question of how it was done) was the right decision — but Afghanistan should never have been invaded in the first place. As socialists we demand: bring all troops home, now. Close all the approximately 800 military bases abroad that do nothing to serve the interests of ordinary people in the US or in the host countries. End the war on terror and domestic racism against Muslims. Use the huge amount of money wasted on the military for Medicare for All, affordable housing, jobs, and a just transition toward a green economy based on racial, gender, and economic justice.
The Afghan people are not passive observers in their own story. There was resistance against the US occupation, and we’re already seeing resistance against the Taliban. Although most of the revolutions ended in setbacks for now, the Arab Spring showed the power of movements opposed to imperialism but also to corrupt domestic ruling classes and right-wing religious reaction. True democracy, only possible in a state run by and for working and oppressed people, will never be imposed from the outside.
Although what’s happening in Afghanistan is certainly tragic, there is a very important silver lining in this blow to US imperialism: if the mightiest military on Earth was defeated so resoundingly by a rag-tag army of militants based on its inability to build any economic and social roots in the country, there is hope for the self-emancipation of millions around the world.
