The Taliban (banned in Russia) have even entered Kabul, occupying the offices and meeting rooms of former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and his administration who have already fled the country – this as the US withdrawal is not even completed.
But is it really shocking?
It shouldn’t be. The US never intended to build up a strong, self-reliant, sustainable government in Afghanistan. The US occupation of Afghanistan was never about “nation building.” It was always an exercise in American hegemony, to occupy a geostrategic location in Central Asia bordering multiple US adversaries including China, Pakistan, and Iran as well as several former Soviet states essential to Washington’s strategy of encircling Russia.
In fact, the US occupation of Afghanistan was essentially the chain-link connecting three of Washington’s most important geopolitical encirclement strategies – its encirclement of Iran, Russia, and China – with Afghanistan sharing part of its border with China’s Xinjiang region.
Afghanistan for US hegemony is such a geostrategic location that the only thing truly shocking would be the prospect of the US simply abandoning its position in Central Asia and truly withdrawing for good.
A truly strong, self-reliant, sustainable government in Afghanistan – had the US ever given rise to such a thing from 2001 to present day, would have been faced with the prospect of joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A truly strong and sovereign government in Afghanistan would have obviously signed up to transform the isolated, landlocked nation into a corridor of trade and transit, securing royalties and driving development within its own borders while facilitating economic growth beyond them across the region.
The US had, from the very beginning never seriously intended to create such a government and allow Afghanistan to determine policy that truly served the Afghan people’s interests – because serving the Afghan people’s interests would be done at the expense of Washington’s geopolitical ambitions.
Understanding this helps understand why after two decades the US failed to create a government or society Afghans would ever be interested in fighting for and upholding after any sort of US withdrawal from the region.
Empire throughout history has always been about creating dependent satraps, vassals, colonies, and client regimes. Effort would be spent specifically to prevent a political, economic, or military development that would shift a subjugated nation from dependence toward independence.
Quarterly reviews by the US government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reflects the documented institutionalization of this premise. The
July 2021 report’s cover features a black and white image of 3 members of Afghanistan’s security forces in mismatching uniforms squatting in front of a battle-damaged concrete barrier, symbolizing just how little “reconstruction” has actually taken place over the last two decades.
The report, despite invoking the term “reconstruction,” instead describes shoddy, unfulfilled contracts most of which pertain to security, politics, and media rather than any real infrastructure projects.
An entire section titled “investigations” lists multiple multi-million dollar fraud cases involving USAID money and the theft of government property by contractors. A look at any SIGAR report from any year during the US occupation revealed similar “progress.”
Most if not all of the contractors brought into Afghanistan were simply interested in making money with little to no interest at all in whether the projects succeeded or not. This too shouldn’t be a surprise. Foreign contractors have no real stake in Afghanistan’s future, and frankly, the longer instability prevailed, the more contracts the US would have needed to issue to run the country via contractors rather than the country running itself.
Large sums of money being doled out by a foreign government also bred immense corruption among local collaborators – corruption so bad that entire programs could not be trusted to be run by Afghan administrators. This highlights the major difference between a nation building something for itself, creating a desire to protect it physically and legally, versus money handed out by a foreign occupier to local collaborators with little sense of responsibility, no real control and thus no real stake in US “development” beyond how much could be earned by being involved in it.
The massive infrastructure investments Afghanistan actually needs both financially and in terms of physical construction are beyond the United States and NATO’s technical abilities and certainly at cross purposes with Washington’s overall goal of creating and maintaining the Afghan government as a subjugated client regime.
If the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan truly made it untenable for a US presence to persist, there would be neither time nor any reason for the US to create a strong, self-reliant government to take over after America’s departure from the country.
The lightning fast collapse of Afghanistan’s “government,” a collapse that appears to have taken place before the US even completed its withdrawal, illustrates just how little substance was ever behind US “reconstruction.”