An Afghan woman in a burqa puts her ballot in a ballot box in Kabul in 2004, in the country's first presidential elections.EMILIO MORENATTI / AP Photo
"The white man's burden," Hannah Arendt wrote in the 1940s, "is either hypocrisy or racism," and those who bore that burden honestly were always exposed as "the tragic and quixotic madmen of imperialism." I remember reading these words in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when many Anglo-American politicians and journalists became members of a global humanitarian crusade.
Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, spoke of bringing salvation not only to Afghans, but "to the hungry, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in poverty and misery, from the deserts of North Africa. to the slums of Gaza ”. Max Boot, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations of the United States, said: "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today call for an enlightened foreign administration, of the kind once provided by arrogant Englishmen in their riding breeches and salacots." Michael Ignatieff, former leader of the opposition in Canada, stressed the need for the United States to establish a "moderate version of the empire." Some Western writers and intellectuals, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy,they resuscitated without qualms the old 19th century antithesis between civilization and barbarism.
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Many writers and thinkers in Asia and Africa were outraged by such blatant neo-imperialism.
Today they feel that same outrage once again as the United States withdraws its troops from Afghanistan amid foreseeable chaos and political, media and security circles on the other side of the Atlantic explode with anger and bitterness over a predictable and inevitable defeat for some time. long time.
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As Max Boot writes in
The Washington Post
, Joe Biden "has made a tragic, catastrophic mistake." The latest issue of
The Economist
, the leading organ of the English-speaking elites, publishes a strong critique of Biden written by none other than Henry Kissinger, whose credibility on this matter was destroyed nearly 50 years ago by his diplomatic and military adventurism in Vietnam. Tony Blair, undaunted despite the disaster in Iraq, has called the US decision "stupid" and has said that Western troops sent to Afghanistan in late 2001, when he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, should stay to protect "what was won. ”. These elite figures do not seem to mind the fact that poverty and violence have increased dramatically in Afghanistan over the past decade. In fact, the situation in the country was already intolerable for Afghans and clearly unsustainable for Western-backed rulers. What's more,The western presence in Afghanistan has been such a resounding failure that groups like the Islamic State, responsible for the horrific suicide bombing at the Kabul airport on Thursday, have managed to gain strength, and the Taliban have been able to take over the entire country without encountering much resistance. .
Criticism of the withdrawal of the US military betrays the delusions of grandeur that have long been fueled and still alive in London, New York and Washington DC and suggests that the real threat to the security and credibility of the West is not in what happens in the Afghan rural areas, but in the political and intellectual dysfunctions in the Anglo-American world, which have given us, one after another, the military failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries, the financial crisis, Brexit and Trump.
As early as 2001, it seemed that many Western ruling classes had learned nothing from the past, neither from the disasters wrought by arrogant Englishmen nor from the perverse legacy they left in Asia and Africa. We watched in horror as the propaganda machine of neo-imperialism took over the mainstream media, from
The New York Times
to the
Financial Times to
the BBC, and even managed to attract enthusiastic military support from countries, like Spain, that had left. his imperial ambitions long ago.
Historian Niall Ferguson claimed in a BBC documentary that the British Empire had spread the benefits of democracy and free trade in Asia and Africa. No one at that time refuted such an absurd claim because writers from Asia and Africa had very little opportunity to prove the truth: that, for example, tens of millions of people had died of famines in India and Ireland when the despotic British authorities converted the two countries in laboratories in which to experience free trade without restrictions.
In recent years, Brexit has exposed, to the amazement of many Europeans, the arrogance, recklessness and ineptitude of Boris Johnson and his more recent predecessors.
These characteristics of the British ruling class already existed when Britain abruptly withdrew from India in 1947. Nor then, as in Afghanistan today, was an orderly withdrawal prepared.
In the anarchy that ensued, up to a million people died, countless women were kidnapped and raped, and the largest refugee population in the world was created;
an immense carnage that surpassed anything that has happened and can happen now in Afghanistan.
A British serviceman with Afghan officers in 1879 Science & Society Picture Library / Getty Images
These catastrophic withdrawals of imperial power, from Cyprus to Malaysia, from Palestine to South Africa, have always been a hallmark of exploitative and callous foreign regimes and we should remember this now that we are witnessing another imperial withdrawal disaster in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, countries find it easy to hide their historical crimes if they maintain their cultural power and prestige. That is why a character like Blair can say that his country was a traditional savior of ignorant humanity and, like wise Greeks advising the Romans with imperial aspirations, he urges Americans to shoulder the burden of the white man around the world. .
They have ignored the simplest lesson of decolonization, the most important event of the 20th century: that the days when white men could invade and occupy Asian and African lands on humanitarian pretexts are over. The basic claim for self-determination, no matter what, was summed up by the least Taliban figure imaginable: Mohandas Gandhi, who waged a campaign against the British during World War II and called on them to “leave India in the hands of God and anarchy. ”.
In their rush to invade and transform Afghanistan in 2001, the Western ruling classes forgot their long and bloody past, their criminal ineptitude in the exercise of government and their dishonorable flight from Asia and Africa. "Let's give war a chance," proclaimed Thomas Friedman, America's most influential foreign policy columnist, in an article published in
The New York Times.
in November 2001. After 20 years of a never-ending and counterproductive war, which brought terrorism to the streets of many Western cities, many Western foreign policy makers have learned nothing from the present, either. A ruinous adventure, which has cost countless lives and billions of dollars, has left Afghanistan undoubtedly worse off than before. Subsequent Western military interventions in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia ruined entire societies and spawned monsters like the Islamic State, which make the Taliban appear liberal next to them. Despite this, the tedious fanatics of the West still want to keep Western troops in Afghanistan.
Those of us who knew Afghanistan - not just its cities - before 9/11 had long foreseen and feared the sinister end that is unfolding in Kabul this week. In December 2001, many Western journalists presented themselves as liberators of Afghanistan, and the dancing and cheering crowds in the capital seemed to endorse their fantasy. They gave the impression that they did not know or did not assimilate that the Taliban had a solid base in Afghan rural society, especially in the southern provinces of the country - where the majority of Pashtun live - and that they had the support of the military leaders and from the intelligence services in Pakistan, for whom the Taliban were a kind of insurance against Western and Indian influence in Afghanistan. As much as the West denied it,Taliban participation in the political future of the country seemed guaranteed.
Portrait of former President Karzai at the Kabul market in 2004.EMILIO MORENATTI / AP Photo
Regardless of what people thought about them, the Taliban represented the sad reality of Afghanistan after decades of devastating violence: after a long struggle between Soviet communists and radical Islamists (including the founders of Al Qaeda) in which the West had Providing the latter with arms and money, a bloody civil war had been fought in which the Taliban won with their promise of a rigorous order. However, talking to Western diplomats, officials and journalists was to enter a world of fiction, in which military and economic aid from the West would help turn Afghanistan into a modern democracy. But how was it possible that the protégés and allies of the West in Afghanistan,Among those who have always been some of the most cruel and corrupt opium traffickers and caudillos in the country, help build democracy and protect women's rights? And who was going to pay, when push comes to shove, the political price for the tens of thousands of Afghans killed by drone strikes, missile bombings and incursions by Western armies?
What surprised me on my visits to Afghanistan was how few were those who asked these basic questions of Westerners dedicated to nation-building, democracy promotion, and humanitarian intervention. The few Afghan voices that were heard came, almost entirely, from an elite trying to replace the Taliban, people who later became infamous for their extraordinary level of corruption and incompetence. In my own articles for American publications, I felt pressure from my bosses not to stray too far from the national consensus on the idea that Americans were promoting democracy and liberating Afghans, especially women, from their cruel oppressors. . This delusion turned the war in Afghanistan into a great intellectual fiasco:a crucial failure that planted the seeds of all other failures - diplomatic, military and political - in Iraq and elsewhere, drastically reduced the power and influence of Europe and the United States in the world and gifted enormous strategic and geopolitical advantages to countries like Iran, Russia, China and Turkey.
Now that intellectual disaster continues to intensify and grow more dangerous as US troops leave the country. The neo-imperialists do not even realize that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan has popular support. In the West, large majorities have long protested the catastrophic and failed wars of their leaders. In Spain, Aznar did not survive the enormous opposition to his warmongering. Blair, disgraced by the Iraq disaster, was disowned by his own party. In the United States, Donald Trump benefited from the exhaustion caused in many citizens by his endless wars; came to power expressly blaming them on the incompetent elites of Washington DC and promising to put an end to them;It is significant that it was Trump who negotiated and formalized the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. Another more sobering factor in the US withdrawal is that organized violence is changing. Conventional military missions have given way to drone strikes, special forces operations, and missile strikes. To the extent that Biden said on Friday that the United States will go after the heads of the Islamic State who have ordered the suicide bombings in Kabul "without undertaking major military operations."To the extent that Biden said on Friday that the United States will go after the heads of the Islamic State who have ordered the suicide bombings in Kabul "without undertaking major military operations."To the extent that Biden said on Friday that the United States will go after the heads of the Islamic State who have ordered the suicide bombings in Kabul "without undertaking major military operations."
Today it seems undeniable that it was an extraordinary folly to link the prestige, security and credibility of the West to the hallucination of a long-lost power, neo-imperialist wars and humanitarian crusades. Because neither the racial and geopolitical hierarchies nor the military technologies created by white Europeans and North Americans when they colonized the world in the 19th century can be reproduced in the 21st. There is no doubt that the reappearance of the brutal Taliban, with their black turbans and long beards, will fuel a male fantasy about the West's just combat against backward and uncompromising natives. "The resistance has just begun," Bernard-Henri Lévy tweeted last week. But the most urgent thing is to save the West and the Afghans from the quixotic madmen of imperialism.
Translation by María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.
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