America’s Shameful Afghanistan Legacy.
Kabul is an ancient, venerable city said to be more than 3500 years old, and was once, not so long ago, famed for its beauty, its exotic gardens and beautiful mosques.
At an altitude of 1,800 metres, Kabul is tucked into a narrow valley formed ‘by the amphitheatre of Hindu Kush peaks, known to medieval Arab geographers as the Stony Girdles of the Earth, that (rise) protectively beneath a pristine covering of snow.’ (1)
The site of the tomb of Babur the Conqueror, the 16th Century founder of the Moghul Dynasty, Babur himself built 10 gardens in and around the city he made his capital. Known as the ‘Gardener King,’ Babur’s favourite Kabul garden was the Bagh-e Babur (see image above), described by Marozzi (2) as 11 hectares of ‘sweeping ground that tumbles down the Western slopes of Mount Sher-i-Darwaza to the foaming Kabul river’ below. His tomb rests in the garden next to a marble mosque built around a 100 years later by Shah Jahan — who later of course commissioned the world’s greatest monument to lost love, the Taj Mahal — and is adorned by this hauntingingly beautiful epitaph:
Only this mosque of beauty, this temple of nobility, constructed for the prayer of saints and the epiphany of cherubs, was fit to stand in so venerable a sanctuary as this highway of archangels, this theatre of heaven, this light-garden of the God-forgiven angel king whose rest is the garden of heaven, Zahiruddin Mohammed Babur the Conqueror.
The author Khaled Hosseini, born in Kabul, describes his early idyllic childhood years before the Russian invasion in colourful terms at the beginning of his wonderfully poetic and tragic book ‘The Kite Runner.’
‘When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of my father’s house and annoy our neighbours by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with dried mulberries and walnuts.’ (3)
That Kabul, that beautiful city is now sadly, a thing of the past. The Russians initially, followed by the first Taliban occupation and the subsequent decades of violent unrest have reduced the ancient city to a shadow of its former glories.
Gone are Babur’s gardens. Falling down and dilapidated is Shah Jahan’s glittering marble mosque. Gone are the grand houses with their huge, yawning fruit trees. Gone are the simple pleasures of being able to fly a kite with friends, or to sit in the shade of a pomegranate tree, heavy with fruit and read the mystic, towering poems of Rumi.
That Kabul is no more.
In the autumn of 2001 the US led invasion of Afghanistan to evict the then occupying force of the Taliban and to capture or kill, the terrorist Osama bin Laden whom they sheltered, was just the latest invasion of a land that seems cursed to be the military playground of imperialistic empires, aggressive warlords, and more latterly, hypocritical, drug-dealing, religious fundamentalists who use their holy War, or Jihad, to peddle an extremist, often Wahhabi-driven, view of the Islamic world in order to inflict a malformed version of Sharia Law onto the hapless victims of their rising and resurgent doctrine.
The Taliban, of course a largely US made construct, now have Kabul, for the second time, in their sights. Kicked out by the US led invasion once, the Taliban 2.0 is a much more wily, much more experienced, and much more lethal iteration of the organisation started by the charismatic, one-eyed Mullah, Mohammed Omar back in around 1992.
Omar had lost his right eye, part of his forehead and cheek, fighting the Russians during the Battle of Jalalabad three years earlier in 1989. A devoted follower of radical Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, Mullah Omar was described in The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (4) as a pious, modest and courageous man who was teaching at a Madrassa (an Islamic School or boarding house) in 1992 when the Afghan government fell to the mujahideen.
Dismayed by the corruption and moral disintegration he saw writ across the warring factions, and ripping his beloved Afghanistan apart, Omar in the depths of despair received a vision from The Prophet who told him to bring peace to his land.
Inspired, he began travelling to madrassas all across the province, eventually persuading a hardy few to join him in his holy quest.
The Taliban was born.
The word itself means ‘students’ in Pashtu, and very soon buoyed by the addition of many veterans of the Russian campaigns, he and his followers took over the administration of the province of Kandahar.
Within months Taliban numbers had swelled to more than 2000 fighters with Mullah Omar cementing his position as ‘Amir-ul-Momineen’ (leader of the faithful) in an audacious ceremony in Kandahar where he partially donned the cloak of The Prophet to take the adulation of his cheering, intoxicated followers (5).
The rest of the country, including Kabul, very soon fell to the Taliban, and only began to give way again following the US led allied invasion in 2001.
But Trump’s fateful decision in February last year — made unilaterally in his characteristically ill-thought out way, and without prior consultation with either US allies or the Afghan government — to draw down the remaining US forces in Afghanistan, a decision confirmed and bolstered by Joe Biden in April this year, has left Afghanistan and its people in the dire straits we see today.
The confident line pushed throughout by Biden and his advisers of a strong, wilful resistance by US and British trained Afghani armed forces in the face of relentless Taliban advances, has not materialised in any way shape or form.
Even yesterday the Pentagon were confidently predicting a strong response by Kabul based government forces. But as I’m writing this the first reports of Taliban advances into the outskirts of Kabul just confirm, once again, how the fantasy peddled by countless US officials, advisers and Presidents over the last two decades, had been manufactured to still the moral unease of an American public, most of whom could not probably even point to Afghanistan on a map, who could not comprehend or countenance the complete and utter failure of America’s longest, costliest war.
Sure, they will continue to tout the death of bin Laden and the crushed relic of Al-Qaeda as proof of the success of their mission.
But we all know now that such minimal successes are just a bit of sugar-coating designed to mask the bitterness of defeat; a defeat borne of a hurried, desperate agenda for vengeance at all costs; of a complete lack for a defined strategy or a plausible aim or even a worthwhile reason for being there other than the rather vague notion of killing the man who had done so much to wound American pride.
The reasons were at the time, understandable after such a tragic, a traumatising event the scars of which remain real and lucid to so many even today.
The lies that followed, and then persisted were not.
The longest war is now over for the US armed forces and the American people, but the longest, and (perhaps) most costly lie in history continues, as the innocent women and children and men of Afghanistan may bear witness to, if only they can survive the horrors that are surely now only hours away.
America: hang your head in shame!
For the decades of lies and mistruths; for the inability to face the prospect of defeat with courage and fortitude; for the endless, empty rhetoric that has left the civilians of Afghanistan to carry the can for your failures; for all the two-faced double dealing, hypocritical words and actions of successive administrations…
America: hang your head in shame!
And if you think that the crushed Al-Qaeda is done with you. Think again!
- Islamic Empires: Fifteen cities that define a civilisation. Justin Marozzi, 2019.
- Ibid.
- The kite runner. Khaled Hosseini, 2004.
- The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda’s road to 9/11. Lawrence Wright, 2011.
- Ibid.
