The U.S. has won the Afghanistan war, because its goal was never to “win” in the traditional sense. Its motivation for getting involved in the country never had anything to do with fighting the Taliban, the Taliban has only been an excuse for its real goals: to be able to militarily leap on neighboring Pakistan’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, to sabotage China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for inflaming Uyghur-Han tensions so China’s Xinjiang province can be destabilized. These motivations were explicitly clarified by former U.S. colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who blew the whistle on Washington’s true intentions for Afghanistan in 2018.
It’s for this reason that Washington also was never genuinely interested in state-building within the country, at least not in the long term. In fact, the recent fall of the country’s U.S.-backed government serves Washington’s goal of preventing China from expanding its infrastructure projects into Afghanistan. As has been shown by Washington’s growing destabilization of the horn of Africa so as to curb Chinese influence within the region, the imperialists see the absence of stable states as preferable to stable states which work with China. And Washington is going to continue to do all it can to keep Afghanistan unstable, despite the narrative that the war has ended.
This is actually the second stage of the war, a war that Wilkerson predicted will go on for decades. He stated that “we’re gonna be in Afghanistan for the next half-century.” And the way in which this conflict will exist after Biden’s withdrawal is becoming clearer with every underhanded trick the imperialists apply.
What most vindicated Wilkerson’s prediction is the fact that Biden isn’t truly taking U.S. forces out of the country. He’s keeping intelligence operatives and special forces while replacing the official troops with private mercenary contractors. As private military companies like Triple Canopy have been profiting off of the fall of Afghanistan’s occupier state, Afghanistan’s Uyghur separatist militants have been receiving a boost. In the year since the U.S. took the Uyghur nationalist group the East Turkestan Islamic Movement off of the terrorist watch list, the ETIM has undergone a massive rise in its manpower, arms, and finances.
This has made the ETIM into an increasingly severe terrorist threat towards China, fulfilling Wilkerson’s prediction that Washington will use the radicalized Uyghurs for targeting the PRC. Washington’s claim last year that it now lacked evidence for the ETIM still engaging in terrorist activities was a total lie.
Washington set up the government it installed to fail, both at ensuring the economic wellbeing of the Afghani people and at preventing terrorism. Biden’s hasty withdrawal has enabled the Taliban to sweep into the government’s central territories with an ease which could easily inspire further jihadist attacks, including from the ETIM. This is something that Beijing has expressly worried about, and that it’s been seeking to avoid by urging the Taliban to cut ties with the ETIM. The Taliban isn’t going to readily comply with this request, showing just how unstable of a ground the imperialists have cultivated for the Chinese; it’s very easy for the Taliban’s victory to spill over into an inflamed Uyghur ethnic nationalism, which the imperialists clearly hope to turn into more Uyghur terrorist attacks within Xinjiang.
Given the historical context behind why the Taliban dominates Afghanistan, this crisis isn’t surprising. The Taliban rose from Washington’s backing of the Mujahideen in the 1980s, which was aided for its commitment to anti-communism throughout Reagan’s proxy war against the Soviet Union. This anti-communism was a symptom of the extreme misogyny, homophobia, and theocratic ideology that the Taliban holds, and that’s now threatening to help inderectly produce further anti-communist warfare from the ETIM.
Warfare that will partner with the unaccountable atrocities of Afghanistan’s U.S. mercenaries and ongoing CIA death squads to not just endanger China and hold back Afghanistan’s infrastructural war recovery, but deepen the humanitarian crisis that’s been produced in the country by global warming. A crisis where approximately 2 million Afghani children currently require nutrition to survive, and where World Food Programme spokesman Tomson Phiri has assessed “We fear the worst is yet to come and a larger tide of hunger is fast approaching.”
None of this was inevitable. It was all by the design of the imperialists, whose backing of the Mujahideen destroyed the Afghani socialist republic under which women were free and the masses had successfully thrown off feudal rule. It was the proxy forces of the U.S. that destroyed Afghanistan’s infrastructure as part of this counterrevolutionary campaign. And it’s the rogue former U.S. proxy the Taliban that’s now fully reverted the country back to the feudalism which Afghanis rejected over a generation ago.
The U.S. long knew that the Taliban’s complete victory was inevitable; it essentially decided to ensure the Taliban’s success by installing a deeply corrupt neo-colonial regime which sold the country off to neoliberal corporate exploitation, and by terrorizing the Afghanis under this regime with CIA death squads who extrajudicially executed entire families. The imperialists created such a hell for Afghanistan that the country’s masses had to embrace the Taliban as the lesser evil. Now Afghanistan’s revolutionaries have to try to overcome both the Taliban, and the potentially even more brutal new mercenary forces that Biden just flooded the country with.
This is why the U.S. won; it pillaged Afghanistan through foreign corporate enterprise to the fullest extent possible, with this exploitation technically still taking place through the rise of the private military companies. Now that this artificially imposed neoliberalism has collapsed with the Taliban’s victory, all that’s left is an unstable feudalism where the imperialists can still wreak chaos and terror upon the masses, all under the more concealed and impune avenue of mercenaries.
This is what will come to every other corner of the world where workers democracies haven’t been formed: a collapse of the decrepit and unsustainable neoliberal economic model, followed by a return to feudalism within state structures which have been rendered fundamentally unstable. It’s the model that the imperialists are applyingto the horn of Africa, where U.S. meddling has been destabilizing a growing number of states following NATO’s 2011 destruction of Libya. Just like in Afghanistan, the empire’s manufacturing of this state of crisis has been preceded by supposed intentions to “nation-build,” and to bring stability to the countries it’s intervened within.
The reality has been the breakdown of supply chains, laws that used to prevent slavery, the enslavement of the refugees this collapse has produced, and the end of the social benefits Libyans used to enjoy under Pan-Africanist Gaddafi — with U.S.-created terrorists filling the power vacuums, parallel to what’s unfolded in Afghanistan. All so that the U.S. empire can build more AFRICOM bases, continue its bombings and drone strikes to benefit the military-industrial complex, and sabotage China’s planned Belt and Road expansions. The U.S. empire can’t be edged out by a multi-polar world if it destroys the world first.
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