Know the Enemy, Know Yourself: Lessons learned and not learned from the US’ 20-year war in Afghanistan

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Appointed Times, 29 November 2024

A must-read commentary by Barnett R. Rubin , based on remarks that he made on 12 November 2024 at a conference convened by the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida in Tampa, entitled “GNSI Policy Dialogues: Rethinking Afghanistan, Strategic Competition in the Heart of Asia.” He looks at lessons learned and not learned from the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan:

The United States has shown that it is institutionally unable to provide usable support for sustainable institutions… The tsunami of cash drowned Afghan society’s own governance mechanisms in a tidal wave of corruption. … Virtually none of the pseudo-institutions reliant on foreign funding survived the U.S. withdrawal.

He also draws parallels with current the US policy in the Middle East:

The U.S. bipartisan consensus to provide material and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, war crimes against the population of Lebanon, and state terrorism such as targeted assassinations throughout the region; plus its insistence on total impunity for its own actions in Afghanistan, have destroyed whatever moral authority the U.S. might claim to invoke international standards and mechanisms for protecting and enforcing human rights and humanitarian law against the Taliban. (…)

The moral blindness and dehumanization of Afghans that allowed President Biden to declare that the U.S. has “zero responsibility” for the welfare of the Afghan women to whom it falsely promised a better future, is identical to the moral blindness and dehumanization of Palestinians that enables a bipartisan consensus in the U.S. to justify Israeli genocide and war crimes as legitimate self-defense. Both are obvious to others, if invisible to us.