Nico Piro talks about the American failure in Afghanistan
“Kabul, crossroads of the world” by Nico Piro read by Tullio Fazzolari
The atrocities of the Russian aggression on Ukraine provoke sacrosanct indignation. But they must not make us forget the horrors of another war that has just ended. Just eight months ago, the Americans and their allies fled Afghanistan after 20 years of conflict. More than a retreat it was an escape. Thousands of dead and billions of dollars did nothing and the Taliban regained total control of the country. It was a total failure which hypocrisy is hardly mentioned any more. And instead you should at least to understand what mistakes have been made and avoid repeating them in the future. (Read also: Why Intellectuals must reinvent themselves. Word of Cassese )
Nico Piro with “Kabul, crossroads of the world” (People, 336 pages, € 17.50) breaks the wall of reticence by retracing the events of the conflict that as a correspondent he followed in all its phases. But his is not simply a war diary. It is also the explanation of a country and its people that Westerners have never understood even in those twenty long years in which they sent weapons, soldiers and dollars. And it is also the description of a proudly proud nation where anyone who tried to intervene by force (from the Tsars to the Soviet Union, from the British Empire to the USA) was punctually torn apart. As if to say: history taught but no one took it into account and we were thrown into a dead end.
To better tell what is happening now and what are the consequences of the western failure, Piro returned to Afghanistan three months after the terrible days of the flight from Kabul airport. And of course everything has changed. Or rather, everything is as it was before Western intervention. The Afghanistan that they wanted to revive was perhaps that of the sixties when women could study freely or even wear bikinis to swim in the pool. Of the Kabul of those times only the photographs hanging in the hotel lobby remain. The bitter observation is that twenty years have been spent without obtaining a result and without preventing Afghanistan from plunging back into fundamentalism.
“Kabul, crossroads of the world” lists and analyzes all the mistakes made by Westerners from the beginning of the military intervention decided by Bush to the Doha accords negotiated during the Trump presidency until Biden's hasty retreat. In fact, it is a manual of mistakes that should never be committed again. But it is quite unlikely that anyone will learn the lesson. For the less young, Piro's story inevitably brings to mind other negative events that cast doubt on Western intelligence. Or, to be more explicit, they raise serious doubts about the validity of the United States' approach in some issues of international politics. Exporting freedom and democracy without taking local realities into account is an impossible undertaking. In Korea, after the war ended, there were twenty-five years of bloody dictatorships. In Vietnam, they relied on inept and corrupt generals. In Afghanistan about politicians who represented only themselves with a president who ran away with the cash when the Taliban arrived. Reading Piro's book, it is hoped that what happened in Kabul will never happen again. But it is just a hope.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/nico-piro-racconta-il-fallimento-americano-in-afghanistan/ on Sat, 23 Apr 2022 07:20:37 +0000.