Events in Afghanistan as the Army Leaves There 8 14 2021

As Joseph Biden prepares to completely leave Afghanistan on the 31st of August, 2021, the Taliban has made enormous gains in placing areas under their control. The major cities are falling daily, the Taliban now close to conquering Kabul, the largest city and the Capital.

Biden has said ““One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me,” Biden added.” in the Washington Post.

It is a bold move to end the 20 year long war, started by Republican George Bush II. It’s been a Republican war, with Donald Trump pumping up the air war, like George Bush II did. Barack Obama did keep the war effort going; but it was something he inherited from George II. Under his rule they got Bin Laden, mastermind of the attacks on the New York skyscrapers. They found him in Pakistan, living comfortably in a modest house with a garden. He was killed by the Americans, mostly as revenge. But the war was started by George II, and perpetuated by Trump.

Since the start of the war, there was always the question of what the goals were. It was for capitalism, obviously, but it was never really enunciated clearly, as it was in Iraq. There it was nationalized oil, which was an accomplishment of the Baath Socialist Party. Thus overthrow the government, and get the wells back under Exxon Mobil and Chevron making a profit again. The invasion of Kuwait started with the wells there being nationalized by Saddam Hussein. The goals were clear, not to allow for the petroleum to be the property of the Iraqi people through nationalized ownership, as they were under the Baath Party.

But Afghanistan always sort of looked like revenge. Why was it necessary for George II to go to war? To get even with the Taliban for attacking New York, but it could have been handled differently with more level headed thinking. Iran is currently under American sanctions, and it drives them nuts. It can seriously hinder the regular functioning of the ruling class. Afghanistan could have simply been put under sanctions, until they gave up Bin Laden. It may have not been as severe a punishment viewed by all the world’s people, a message not to fight the Americans. But it may have averted what is now obviously becoming a military failure the minute the Afghans have to fight for themselves.

George II, like Donald Trump, did not command a majority in universal suffrage. Yet George II was fighting “dictatorship vs. democracy”. Trump too, often called his bourgeoisie “pro democracy”. This was connected to the 9/11 incident; the rest of the world did not see the legitimacy of George II as a leader of democracy, and someone attacked the country under his leadership. It was like Trump, everybody knew he did not command a majority, yet we were all expected to go along with it.

It was George II’s war, he was a “war president”. The Republican bourgeoisie he represented should be remembered as having started the war, Biden’s liberal progressive bourgeois the end of it.

The Taliban came to power fighting the Soviet Union, and they were trained and armed by the Americans in the war against the Soviets. They found them in Pakistan’s religious schools, where the Taliban would claim their name from, Taliban means “student” in Pashtun. They were recruited to fight by the Americans, and they defeated the Russians.

The point is, the bourgeois taught these people how to fight, and they turned against them. Now it looks like the Americans and their NATO European Union support have also lost the war there. Kabul may fall shortly, as have Kandahar, Herat, etc. Short of something strange happening, Afghanistan is lost. The war is ending, without a victory for NATO or the Americans. No profit is going to be made there, the investment of a trillion dollars in the war effort there for 20 years is lost.

There are Republicans who still want to fight war there, but given the failure of the Afghan Army, it certainly looks like the only thing that was stopping the Taliban from taking power was the presence of the American Army there. The minute NATO and Americans pulled people out of there, the country started falling. They had 20 years to train the Afghans, would another 20 years be enough for them to take care of themselves?

Biden may be in favor of the Embargo against Cuba, and upset with China. But under his leadership the country is making a hard choice that Trump was unable to make; to extricate themselves from a conflict that they were not winning. Although not everybody agrees with it, he did attain the sanction of universal suffrage to govern, and it was his decision based on the will of the majority. Perhaps that above all else will be remembered in the end.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

8 14 2021

Here’s another one from the archive:

Afghanistan Falls to the Taliban 8 19 2021

On the 15th of August, 2021, America lost the war against Afghanistan. The largest city, the capital Kabul, fell to the Taliban. The rest of the country by this point was mostly under Taliban control, and the capital falling ended America’s 20 year war, which was a failure.

A nonessential evacuation order (NEO) followed, with a scene resembling the fall of Saigon, an airlift operation from the airport in Kabul. The rush of thousands of Afghans and others attempting to board aircraft to escape resulted in several deaths, with some clinging to military aircraft during takeoff.

About a day later, the military part of the airport was up and running again, with a few thousand Army men guarding the retreating Americans. The press was able to exit, and a few thousand Americans, some diplomats.

Ashraf Ghani, the hand picked diplomat who was running the government, fled to the United Arab Emirates, where he is currently. He fled the country as the government fell, NATO and the American’s leader who was responsible for Afghanistan.

Joseph Biden joins the ranks of Harry Truman, who lost in Korea, John F. Kennedy, who failed to stop the Cuban revolution, and Gerald Ford, who saw the loss of Vietnam. The repeated failure of the Army to win victories against people in the developing world, in this case against a group with no aircraft, in the face of a massive aerial bombing campaign, showed again the weakness of the bourgeoisie, unable to stop peasants after 20 years and more than a trillion dollars spent, on the Afghan Army.

For years we were used to hearing the desperation of the Taliban, when the Americans were losing it was due to suicide bombers, etc. The way it looks now is the minute they started pulling out the men, which Donald Trump had originally agreed to, but could not as he was not elected, Biden was instead, and Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. If anything Biden delayed the inevitable; Trump said May 20th the war would end, BIden was 2 months later.

Yet the Republicans, and some Democrats, are suggesting this was Biden’s fault, that he misled the people by ending war there. We all know Trump’s agreements were often lies, that he often said he would do something, then failed to carry out his decisions; that things would have looked different if Joseph Biden had not commanded a majority of 7 million votes to Trump.

The only difference would have been we all know Trump was lying when he agreed to remove the American Army on May 20th.

Joe Biden stuck to his word, and honored the agreement, and the rest is history. Biden’s decision was a courageous one, standing up the Pentagon in a war started by Republicans under George Bush II, continued by Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The bourgeois finally had to admit the war was costing them men, and was not returning treasure or profits. Even if there was victory, Afghanistan would never have brought the Americans the trillion dollars they spent there in the war. The people they had in their proxy army were mostly illiterate, some even had trouble taking basic commands, like adding up numbers.

Like Vietnam, the airlift is bringing back the bourgeoisie and their supporters from the Kabul airport, many lucky to have saved the skin on their backs. It is not clear how long the Nonessential Evacuation Order will take to be completed, perhaps until the Taliban have had enough. There are still thousands of people trying to fly out of Kabul, and only the military side of the airport is still flying.

It remains to be seen if this is a once in a generation spectacle. Syria was also lost, although it was not as clear looking. Trump had bombed Syria many times, and the Americans are not in control of Syria, Bashar Assad is still in power. They always said removal of Assad was the goal of the Army being deployed there. Another failure, although a slower less sensational one.

The war this time lasted 20 years, the longest yet, only to result in a loss. It must be quite demoralizing, to have lost thousands of men and a trillion dollars, in a small country without even an air force. George II got them into it, and was unable to win; Obama inherited what looks now like a hopeless battle from George II. It was remarkable it lasted this long, the pandemic made fighting in a conflict overseas without vaccinations, Trump’s predicament, impossible to maintain. Even with vaccines, the virus is still spreading, and more than 600,000 people in America have died from Covid 19. The military is just now starting to receive orders to vaccinate all their people. Not good conditions to be tooling around the other side of the world trying to stop peasant rebellion.

The blame lies with the first efforts to support the Taliban against the Soviet Union, which they won. But look what was left behind, the Taliban in power. The same group they armed and trained overthrew their American supported government. The rest of the blame lies with the Republican bourgeoisie, who chose war over sanctions when the skyscrapers were attacked in 2001.

They did get Bin Laden, but revenge was the main motive keeping the conflict going. With only capitalism the motive for fighting, things finally came to a head in August of 2021, when the Army they created was conquered, mostly without even a fight. The flight of Ashraf Ghani to the UAE symbolically ended the foreign invasion of Afghanistan.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

8 19 2021

Wait there’s more:

The American Occupation of Afghanistan Ends 8 30 2021

The last flight left Afghanistan loaded with the soldiers, ending almost exactly 20 years of war. The pictures of the helicopters evacuating the diplomats from the rooftop a powerful symbol of the end of American intervention in Afghanistan.

It was the second superpower to lose a war there in less than 50 years. First it was the Soviet Union that was removed from Afghanistan in 96’ by the Taliban, with American assistance. They supported the rebels who fought the war against the Communist Party there, and successfully removed the government the Soviet Union had established there.

The same Taliban would refuse to surrender Bin Laden, mastermind of the attacks in 2001 that struck the skyscrapers in New York. Bin Laden, who came from a royal family in Saudi Arabia, would eventually be caught in Pakistan, although at some point he was living in Afghanistan, according to the Americans.

America’s longest war would last 20 years, cost trillions of dollars, yet end in a retreat from the last remaining enclave of control, the Kabul airport. They airlifted a little over 100,000 people in a period of a few weeks; the spectacle of thousands of Afghans who got on the tarmac was another memorable event, much like the airlift from Saigon in 1975.

They got most of the Americans out, anyone left is now on their own in an Afghanistan no longer under the Americans and NATO. The last of the diplomats left, their embassy shuttered, its contents destroyed in order to keep it secret from the Taliban.

The agreement Donald Trump made with the Taliban to leave and end the war was accomplished by Joseph Biden, something that escaped the former, who tried to suggest if he won the election the soldiers would stop fighting by May. We all know Trump was notorious for lying, we came to expect it in the 4 years he was in power. The epitome of Trump lying was his suggestion that the landslide victory of Biden by 7 million votes in suffrage was a fraud. There are still some believers who think someone like me would vote twice.

Voting twice is fraud, Punishment for fraud includes the following: Jail or Prison sentence: A misdemeanor conviction could carry a sentence of up to a year in a local jail, while a felony conviction carries a maximum sentence of 20 to 30 years in federal prison. How would you like to have that on your criminal record? You would never get a job again. The idea that there were thousands of Milwaukeeans who voted twice is being entertained by the State Legislature here of late. Although Joe Biden was preferable to Trump, finding even a dozen ballots cast twice simply has not happened.

The point is we were used to the Republican bourgeoisie and their bold faced lies, and the argument seems to be that Trump would have changed his mind and the Taliban would not have taken power.

So here we are again, like lifting the mask mandates, something the Republicans said they wanted, a May 20th return of the Army home from Afghanistan they are now rejecting. The Covid 19 pandemic continues, the reactionaries afraid that getting vaccinated is really a shot that is going to affect your mind, and you will start liking Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

So here we go again, their own decisions resulting in reality. The pandemic is raging in the South, more than a thousand dead a day; Florida, Texas, Alabama etc. the epicenters of the Delta variant of Covid, due to the politicization of masks and vaccination by the Republicans,

All Biden did is do what Trump told us he wanted to do, like stopping mask mandates, ending the war, etc. It’s been their own decisions that have gotten them to where they are today, there is noone to blame but themselves.

And it was the Republican bourgeoisie who were in power when the war started, under similar conditions. Like Donald Trump, George Bush II did not command a majority in universal suffrage, yet it was “democracy vs dictatorship” in Iraq and Afghanistan. George II could have simply applied trade sanctions on Afghanistan, until they gave up Bin Laden.

Instead 20 years, trillions of dollars, and no treasure returning, American companies making a profit by employing Afghan workers, etc.

They taught the Taliiban how to overthrow the government when they fought the Soviet Union. They won, but in time the knowledge they gave them came back to haunt the Americans. The Taliban, armed with no airplanes; only guns, rocket launchers, and landmines have overthrown what was once a superpower. The nuclear weapons did not help them, or the night vision goggles, stealth aircraft, etc.

The Taliban are not a western movement. The ideas they have did not agree with the Soviet Union either. Are we really to believe that Nato and the Americans value the rights of women more than the Soviets did?

Yet the more liberal ideas of the west are trumpeted as what was lost to the Taliban. They could have just left Russia in control of Afghanistan and the rights of women if anything would be better than what the occupation brought. Equality was a value of the communists the Taliban removed in 96”.

We will soon see what the effects of this loss of territory means to places still occupied, like Iraq. If the oil gets nationalized again we will know for sure they lost. When ExxonMobil and Shell no longer pump the oil there will be no treasure returning home to American capitalists. Departures from bourgeois society such as industry capable of making profit that is not owned by capitalists always proves to be controversial.

It is not clear what Afghanistan is moving towards with the removal of Russia first than the Americans. But it was the fault of the bourgeoisie they are where they are today.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

8 30 2021