{"id":4083,"date":"2021-09-11T14:04:07","date_gmt":"2021-09-11T18:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4083"},"modified":"2021-09-21T11:59:29","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T15:59:29","slug":"twenty-years-since-9-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/09\/twenty-years-since-9-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty years since 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span>fter nearly twenty years of war and occupation in Afghanistan, U.S. armed forces finally completed their withdrawal on August 31, leaving the country in the hands of the Taliban, the organization that it had removed from power when the U.S. originally invaded in October 2001. Just a few weeks earlier, President Joe Biden had told a press conference that there were no significant parallels between the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and its final withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975. He added that \u201cthe likelihood there\u2019s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.\u201d<\/p>\n

But by the time the U.S. left, the Taliban was back in control. And the chaotic scenes at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul in the weeks leading up to the U.S. departure reminded many of the desperate panic at the U.S. embassy in Saigon forty-six years before.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are also many differences between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Facile analogies should be avoided. But by any measure, this was an ignominious defeat for the world\u2019s most powerful military nation, only days before the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.<\/p>\n

When members of al Qaeda hijacked four planes and flew three of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington D.C. (the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after its passengers fought back), anti-war activists in the United States raised the slogan \u201cDon\u2019t Turn Tragedy into War.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of us also pointed out that however unjustifiable the attacks, the U.S. government itself bore its own share of responsibility for them because of its long-term imperialist meddling in both the Middle East and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

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Pentagon 9\/12\/01; Photo<\/a> by North Dakota National Guard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In April 1978, the pro-Soviet People\u2019s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power following a military coup. It attempted to rapidly introduce a series of social reforms, but while its cadre may have had the best of intentions, they had little support in the country at large. Its efforts produced a backlash, particularly in rural areas, which soon led to armed clashes.<\/p>\n

The U.S. government, still stinging from its defeat in Vietnam, saw an opportunity. From the summer of 1979, it began secretly funneling support<\/a> to government opponents. According to Jimmy Carter\u2019s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brezinski:<\/p>\n

\u2026it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention\u2026. We didn\u2019t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With the country spiraling towards civil war and a power struggle breaking out between different factions of the PDPA, the Soviet Union sent in troops in December 1979 to prop up a friendly government on its border. That same day Brezinski sent Carter a letter: \u201cWe now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.\u201d<\/p>\n

In effect, that is what happened. The Soviet occupation lasted for over nine years. It was a brutal and bloody affair, which left over one million Afghans dead. But just like the U.S. in Vietnam, the Soviets were never able to defeat the rebels, who called themselves \u201cmujahideen\u201d or holy warriors, and who received billions of dollars of aid from Washington, first from Carter and then from Reagan.<\/p>\n

The CIA also encouraged tens of thousands of Islamic radicals to come to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. They received training and weapons from the Pakistani security services, paid for by U.S. taxpayers.<\/p>\n

The U.S. knew it was backing reactionary forces, but it was willing to do so to win the Cold War. And it worked. The occupation was a huge financial burden for Moscow, which finally withdrew in February 1989. Most commentators think that the impact of the war played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet government two years later.<\/p>\n