Janine Jackson interviewed Matthew Hoh, senior fellow with the Center for International Policy and a member of the Eisenhower Media Network, about the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan for the August 20, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
New York Times (8/15/21)
Janine Jackson: Here is the New York Times‘ August 15 editorial:
The war in Afghanistan began in response by the United States and its NATO allies to the attacks of September 11, 2001, as an operation to deny Al Qaeda sanctuary in a country run by the Taliban. How it evolved into a two-decade nation-building project in which as many as 140,000 troops under American command were deployed at one time is a story of mission creep and hubris, but also of the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy.
A graduate thesis might be devoted to unpacking the assumption, euphemism, denial, just the sheer Kool-Aid in that little story. But suffice to say the fact that this is the country’s paper of record telling anyone curious how best to understand what they’re currently seeing unfold in Afghanistan is troubling.
There are other ways to understand. They involve listening to other voices than those corporate media tend to foreground. If we’d been hearing those other voices all along, who knows how different today’s conversation would be.
Matthew Hoh is a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy and a member of the Eisenhower Media Network. He joins us now by phone from North Carolina. Welcome to CounterSpin, Matthew Hoh.
Matthew Hoh: Hi, thank you so much for having me on.
JJ: We read about a 20-year war. And I understand that. But I wonder if you would take a minute to draw a bigger historical picture. Because it’s meaningful for the people who should be at the center of the story and yet somehow never quite really are, namely the Afghan people. This is more than 20 years for them.
MH: Absolutely. And thank you for bringing up this point. I think the commentary that puts this war in a 20-year perspective is indicative of why the United States has failed so miserably in Afghanistan.
The United States has wanted this war in Afghanistan to be about Al Qaeda and 9/11. And certainly that’s what Joe Biden tried to do in his remarks the other day. And the reality is that this is a living legacy of the Cold War. This war begins, I think you could fairly start it, in 1973, when the king is deposed. And since that time—same year I was born, 48 years ago—there has been nothing but political chaos or violence, war, in Afghanistan. And the majority of that has been instigated to a degree, and supported greatly, by outside nations, chiefly the United States.
And what makes the tragedy about Afghanistan even more tragic is so much of this war, so much of this violence and suffering, it’s got almost nothing to do with the Afghans themselves.
The United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s looked at Afghanistan as a forum of competition: Who is going to get Afghanistan to reflect their color on the map?
JJ: Right.
Zbigniew Brzezinski (cc photo: CSIS)
MH: Is Afghanistan going to be blue, or is it going to be red? And so I think that’s why you have these circumstances that unfold from that.
In 1979, before the Soviet Union invades, the Carter administration launches a policy of supporting Islamist rebel groups in Afghanistan, because in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, in Brzezinski’s vision, the idea would be that we would utilize these Islamist rebel groups in Afghanistan to cause problems in Afghanistan, to bait the Soviet Union into invasion and give them their own Vietnam. And this occurs six months before the Soviet Union invades.
And so the Soviet Union does that. And the Soviet Union, of course, is certainly responsible for its actions. And one of the things we know about the Soviet Union’s decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979 was that it was in many ways influenced by the American removal from Iran. You can find this in discussions from the notes from the Politburo from the time. But the Soviets are worried that because the Americans lost their bases in Iran, that the Americans are now going to go into Afghanistan.
So even from this vantage point, you’re right, I mean, 40-some odd years later, you can still see, in our current decision making, how little of the United States’ decisions about Afghanistan have been about the Afghans themselves.
Certainly 9/11, where you’re talking about an organization of less than 400 people, Al Qaeda, 400 people worldwide, 9/11 attacks, where none of the hijackers were Afghans. Almost all of the planning, the training, the support for the attacks came from Pakistan, from Germany. The hijackers met in Malaysia, in Spain, possibly in the UAE or Qatar. And then, of course, we had hijackers here in this country for 18 months before the attacks. The most important training the hijackers received was in American flight academies and martial arts academies. But somehow it’s about Afghanistan.
Risk board
And the United States, of course, is not the only one who is culpable in this. The Pakistanis, the Iranians, the Indians, the Russians, etc., many different nations have been playing what used to be called in the 19th century “The Great Game”—
JJ: Right.
MH: —you know, treating Afghanistan as if it is a real-life version of the game Risk.
JJ: Exactly.
MH: And the Afghan people have just endured unbelievable suffering because of that.
JJ: I was actually just going to invoke the game Risk. It’s all like an abstract chess game, as it were, and US media sort of present it that way. And had no hesitancy to move the goalposts: “Well, we’re punishing Al Qaeda.” “No, we’re saving women.” “No, we’re building a nation state.” It’s as if the goal doesn’t matter, because you’re just supposed to get behind whatever the US is doing.
Right now, US media news consumers are seeing chaos and calamity. And it’s being reported as being caused by the withdrawal of US troops. So a binary mindset says, “No! I don’t like chaos. Put the troops back.” Unfortunately, the general run of media coverage doesn’t really stay at a level much more subtle than that. So I want to ask you, how do we gird ourselves? What should we be holding in mind as this very war-framed conversation swirls around us in the coming days and weeks?
MH: I think we want to think that the events that are occurring right now, we have complete agency over, and they’re not influenced by the past, not influenced by history. And I think we have to be very much aware of that. So as you hear people say why we shouldn’t leave Afghanistan—I wish I was joking about this, but you see commentators, serious commentators, as people in DC would describe them: “If we’re not in Afghanistan, then the Chinese will be.” That’s what the Soviet Union said: “If we’re not in Afghanistan, then the Americans will be.”
That’s what the British said in the 19th century: “If we’re not in Afghanistan, the Russians will be.” Turns out the Russians never had any plan to invade Afghanistan in the 19th century. But the British invaded Afghanistan at least three times because of that.
So I think it’s important to tie ourselves to history, to understand how the same things keep unfolding. One of the things I think is important, too, is that, look, Joe Biden was in office, he was a US senator, when the Vietnam War ended. Just because something happened 50 years ago doesn’t mean that our people who are in power making these decisions aren’t the legacies of that.
Just as I described the Afghan War as being a living legacy of the Cold War, it still exists.
AP (6/30/21)
Take a man like Donald Rumsfeld. I had this experience one time when I was in the Marine Corps, and Donald Rumsfeld came up to me, and he pointed at a portrait of Eisenhower that myself and a friend were standing in front of. And he said, “You know how old I am? I’m so old I used to work with that guy.”
And so you can understand that. The man who was in charge of the Defense Department at the end of Vietnam had worked with Dwight Eisenhower. Dwight Eisenhower was old enough to have known and worked with Civil War veterans. So we’re not actually that far removed from history.
So to think that what occurred in the 1970s in Afghanistan, what occurred in the 1980s in Afghanistan, what occurred in the 1990s, doesn’t have repercussions now is one of the reasons why, I think, that the media coverage and people’s understanding of the war is so very basic, is so limited.
Certainly there’s a legacy to this. There are events that occurred, there are reasons for this. Why would the Taliban have such popular support from the Afghan people? Maybe there’s a history to it.
Look, in this country, if anyone was to say to any of us that the Civil War is a forgotten relic of American history, and doesn’t influence current culture, politics, society, whatever, we would say you’re absolutely crazy.
JJ: Right.
MH: We have a media that reports about Afghanistan as if only what has occurred within the last week or last month matters.
Take, just for example, the Doha Agreement, signed between the Taliban and the United States, signed in February 2020. That was almost 18 months ago. There has been very little media discussion about what happened in those 18 months, when negotiations were supposed to be occurring between the Taliban and the Afghan government. It’s almost as if that time doesn’t factor, or matter.
The reporting will say, basically, “Doha Agreement signed February 2020. May 1, 2021, Biden says we’re pulling troops out.” No discussion whatsoever about, well, how come nothing occurred? Why weren’t negotiations successful? What prompted this to play out this way, where the Taliban, in my opinion, basically said, “Hey, we’ve given you 18 months to negotiate. We’re just going to take it now.”
JJ: Yeah.
MH: As well as, too, just that type of discussion where the Taliban have agency, where the Taliban need to be understood as an army and a political organization that is not the narrative we have of these troglodytes in caves.
JJ: And so, when we’re going to hear—as we’re going to hear, as we move toward September 11—“We need to begin bombing again because terrorism,” we have to hold in our mind that things are more complicated. But that our role is fairly simple, in terms of saying, “No, we’re not. Bombing for peace is not going to work.”
Matthew Hoh: “You’ve seen terror groups increase by a factor of five. How can anyone say that this has been successful?” (image: BillMoyers.com)
MH: Absolutely correct. I think there’s a lot of very good evidence, very clear evidence, that bombing for peace does not work.
Look, we mentioned earlier that Al Qaeda was 400 people total on 9/11. Total, worldwide. And because of the US response to the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda grew into an organization of tens and tens of thousands of members. They expanded to a presence around the world, where they had the fighting capability to take over and control entire cities and regions. We now have the Islamic State as a consequence of that.
So anyone who thinks that the United States’ war against terror has been successful because of the occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., simply is either foolish or is lying about it. Because how can anyone look at what happened with Al Qaeda international terror groups, and say that they have been defeated over the last 20 years? They may at this point not be as capable as they previously were. But they have not been defeated, and they have benefited greatly from the American response to 9/11.
And just another quick data point on that. In 2001, the United States State Department said there were four international terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year, the United States State Department and the US military said that there are 20 international terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So by pursuing this policy in Afghanistan, by pursuing this war, as well as the war that was conducted in Pakistan as well, where tens and tens of thousands of people were killed, you’ve seen terror groups increase by a factor of five. How can anyone say that this has been successful?
But what we have seen, though, is an evolution of American warfare that tries to hide the cost of war from the American people, and that will allow these wars to continue. Because I think most Americans are not aware that, since 9/11, US troops, in at least 15 countries, not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but 15 countries, have been killed and have killed in combat since 9/11. But most of that is hidden from the American public, and that’s a very deliberate thing that the US government, military and CIA does.
JJ: We’ll be taking this up with you, I’m sure, further in the future. For now, we’ve been speaking with Matthew Hoh of the Center for International Policy and the Eisenhower Media Network. His piece, “What Critics of the US Withdrawal From Afghanistan Get Wrong,” appears on CNN.com. And “A Cruel and Unjust Peace for Afghanistan” can be found on Newsweek.com. Thank you so much, Matthew Hoh, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
MH: Thank you so much.
The post ‘So Much of This War Has Got Almost Nothing to Do With the Afghans Themselves’ appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson | Radio Free (2021-08-27T21:53:26+00:00) ‘So Much of This War Has Got Almost Nothing to Do With the Afghans Themselves’. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/27/so-much-of-this-war-has-got-almost-nothing-to-do-with-the-afghans-themselves/
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