Because the West must not apologize for the twenty years of presence in Afghanistan
Hell in Kabul has no limits. The crowds created at Karzai airport, now the only escape route to the outside world, also allowed two suicide bombers, probably from the Islamic State, to blow themselves up in the crowd. While summing up the catastrophe, it is legitimate to ask: why are they running away? Why do they risk their lives, clinging to an airplane trolley to fly away, or do they line up despite knowing, for days, that the Islamic State, an enemy of the Taliban, as well as the West, was threatening attacks?
The answer, to be given, requires a certain degree of frankness: the West doesn't suck as much as it seems. Because, judging by the comments ranging from the Manifesto that dusts off its anti-imperialism of the 70s, to MicroMega , a glossy magazine, up to the self-styled medieval Massimo Fini , passing through Sergio Romano, expression of a "realist" center , everyone seems to agree on one point: you didn't even have to go to Afghanistan. Indeed, now that we are leaving, we must apologize for the past 20 years.
The left asks all those who had voted for the intervention to make a mea culpa , because, they say, the West is the true epicenter of the world's evil, its rights and its democracy are (as Marx already believed) a screen of the interests of the capitalists. Every war in the West is, by definition, a war of exploitation of the rich against the poor world. That of the Taliban is therefore a revenge of a poor people. For the right, however, the Taliban are all in all to be admired, because they remain in antiquity and have defeated the post-modern empire. Now they forbid music and television, consumerism and contacts with the outside world and therefore, on the right, not a few reactionaries are wondering whether it is appropriate to imitate their model, while respecting due religious and traditional differences. From the realist center, on the other hand, comes the usual sermon against humanitarian military commitments, especially if they are so long: better balances, dictated by "geopolitical" criteria. In short, the West is in its soup.
All these analyzes skip the origin of the long war by omitting or minimizing it. Because we did not go to Afghanistan to make the empire or even for humanitarian purposes. If we had really gone for humanitarian reasons, we should have left in 1996, when the Taliban seized power and imposed their nightmare totalitarianism. If we had started with the idea of civilizing them, we would have had to move at least in March 2001, when the Islamic Emirate destroyed the Buddhas of Bamyan, the most striking symbolic gesture of Taliban obscurantism. Instead, the West tolerated this and more, turning its gaze, aware that "wars are not waged to export rights". We only moved after 9/11, only when the US was attacked at home and the aggression came from Afghanistan, then Osama bin Laden's main base. The war was defensive, not expansionist.
The conflict began only after the futile attempt to demand an extradition, impossible for a regime that protects its jihadist brothers and denies the legitimacy of unfaithful states. In conducting the operations, the US was not arrogant, it did not "invade" anything: it militarily supported the Northern Alliance, one of the factions of a civil war that was already underway . It is difficult to find a better example of a just war. If anything, we have lost, without honor, because we have no longer been able to identify the enemy, we do not even want to name him. If you just say the two words "radical Islam" you get beaten on the fingers by the foremost expert in international relations, by multiculturalists (who see the use of that definition as a form of racism and discrimination against all Muslims) and by the politicians who they listen. Yet radical Islam, that of 9/11, existed and still exists today.
Tony Blair ( here in Italian ), the British Prime Minister who initiated the intervention together with George W. Bush (who instead remains in his deathly silence) reminds us clearly:
Western politicians can't even accept calling it "radical Islam". We prefer to identify it as a set of disconnected challenges, each to be tackled separately. If we had called it a strategic challenge, and had seen it as a whole and not divided into parts, we would never have made the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Our thinking is badly set in relation to radical Islam. We recognized revolutionary communism as a threat of a strategic nature, which required us to face it both ideologically and with security measures. It lasted more than 70 years. All that time, we never dreamed of saying, "Well, we've been dealing with this for a long time, we should just give up."
And here Blair sins of optimism, because in Italy, talking about the "threat of revolutionary communism" risks one's career. However, in any case, the former premier asks himself: “This is what we must decide now about radical Islam. Is it a strategic threat? – Blair asks himself – If so, how do those who oppose it come together, even within Islam, to defeat it? "
The answer that most of today's leaders give is: "no, radical Islam does not exist and therefore does not constitute a strategic threat to the West". But it is also hard to think that Blair is wrong and his successors are right. Because, as the experience of terrorism in 2015-16 demonstrates, the birth of an Islamic State between Syria and Iraq has constituted a worldwide danger. What could happen after the birth of this Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan? Will we still be able to alienate ourselves to the point of considering every attack as the "gesture of a madman"? And to what extent can we deny the evidence?
It is also taken for granted that 20 years of Western presence in Afghanistan, in addition to not defeating terrorism, have brought only damage and no benefit. On the contrary, they have increased the grudge against us and pushed many Afghans to embrace the Taliban cause. Yet, not only the late Gino Strada, or his most ideologized doctors, tell us about the reality on the ground. There are also numerous spontaneous testimonies of Italian soldiers and civilians who, in Afghanistan, have actually made themselves useful, bringing back a minimum of security and allowing the locals to return to live. In this regard, Blair writes:
We did it (the withdrawal, ed ) in the knowledge that, although worse than imperfect, and although immensely fragile, there have been real gains in the last twenty years. And for anyone who disputes it, read the heartbreaking lamentations of every sector of Afghan society about what they fear will be lost. Earnings in the standard of living, especially in the education of girls, earnings in freedom. Not quite what we hoped or wanted. But nothing. Something worth defending, something worth protecting. We did it when the sacrifices of our troops had made those fragile conquests a duty to be preserved.
Now of those earnings there are only desperate people, lives hanging on a foreign plane, ready for anything to escape from the nightmare into which, after twenty years (almost a generation), they are falling back.
The post Why the West must not apologize for twenty years of presence in Afghanistan appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/perche-loccidente-non-deve-scusarsi-per-i-ventanni-di-presenza-in-afghanistan/ on Fri, 27 Aug 2021 03:50:00 +0000.