Capitalism in Afghanistan: From Triumphalism of Western “Mighty power” to chaos
September 11th marked the twentieth anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. While the United Nations Security Council agreed that this was a terrorist attack, many critics are still skeptical about the designation of real perpetrators of those atrocities. Some believe Al-Qaeda masterminded the hijacking of the planes, others believe a planned and coordinated inside job from US intelligence and law enforcement agencies led to the killing of more than two thousand people in New York.
The US Senate released its report on the attack one year later in December. Surprisingly, the US government managed rapidly to gather an international coalition and bypass Senate approval while manipulating UN Security Council to acknowledge an International military coalition that would start an invasion campaign into Afghanistan. The reason laid by Americans and their NATO partners with the United Kingdom and France in the frontline of diplomatic cabal was to oust the Taliban that provided safe haven to Al-Qaeda leadership. On October 7th 2001, the International Security Assistance Force started the campaign that led to a military invasion that resulted in the loss of civilian lives from both side of allies and Afghan citizens.
The war in Afghanistan exposed many features of aggressive capitalism manifested by the triumphalism of Western “mighty power”. Among those aspects, the use of drones program by US and allies targeting both combatant and non-combatant Afghans, the boost of economic interest of Private Military Companies leading to human rights violations and shooting of civilians, the increase of opium market from western investments in Afghanistan, the use of torture in interrogation techniques of detainees by the Central Intelligence under which many presumed suspects lost their lives, the installation of structural corruption schemes by promoting corrupted officials in Afghan government’s leadership position par affiliation to western interests, and the relegation by ignoring of Afghan citizens’ grievances in terms of social life, security, employment, human rights and eradication of poverty.
The question to the most propagandized military campaign that demonstrated western addiction to power covered the economic agenda that consisted of occupying Afghanistan for regional strategic interests. Security experts believe that the Afghan invasion paved the way to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, positioned US at the doorstep of China from the West and Russia from South-East, got US-Israeli coalition closer to Iran and permitted the infiltration of Arab leadership to manage Middle-East policy and promote western agenda in the region.
Between 2007 and 2010, Julian Assange released, through Wikileaks, more than a million documents called “The War in Afghanistan Cables” involving the use of secret military equipment, programs and tactics against civilians in total violation of United Nations Human Rights Declaration. In 2010, Wikileaks revealed that a secret CIA report shows that Sweden intended to bomb Afghanistan with its Grippen Fighter jets to boost its marketability. While the French used their Rafal jets to bomb civilians and the British extensively used Typhoon. This is the military aviation competition of people’s life. According to a report in The Intercept, the top five US defense contractors (Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) extraordinarily benefit from 20 years of the Afghanistan war.
To date, the total number of civilians killed in the coalition campaign is estimated to be 51,613 according to the BBC News article of 13 July 2021. According to the UN, 2,6millions Afghans remain refugees around the world today and 200,000 people were internally displaced in the first half of 2020.
In February 2020 at Doha, the US government signed an agreement with the Taliban that paved the way to US withdrawal and negotiations for post-US presence in Afghanistan. That is perhaps the technical element occasioning the rapid Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan provinces in less than ten days in August 2021. The fall of the Afghan government offers a spectacular lecture of western failure to organize another country for commercially driven military purposes. Reading these events with social analytical lenses, such chaos proves that capitalism may use its logistical and technological mode to sustain its solvability but the will of organized people guarantees the failure of its dominance cycle. While this is one more military failure of superpower after many others in history, the arrogance of capitalists to admit failure translates mostly into another reinvention with argumentative strategies.
The organization of Afghans recently illustrates the incapacity of capitalism necessary conditions for lasting peace in foreign nations. The records of the western occupation of Afghanistan lead us to conclude that capitalism is at the end of the road with its strategies and has doubtfully no future in our societies. In conclusion, Afghanistan seemingly constitutes the land of superpowers’ competition since the end of the Cold War. Starting from the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the US led coalition invaded a decade later. Currently, US withdrawal occasions Chinese intentions opting to build ties with the Taliban. The failure of military economy from the USSR and NATO allies may probably stimulate China to adopt a veiled form of economic domination in Afghanistan playing by its strategy of cheap commodity and cheap labor exploitation. As a result of that, Afghan citizens are abandoned to their own fate.
