Afghanistan is an Old Battlefield in a New Cold War

The US Senate voted this week to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the 13 service members killed in the Kabul airport bombing on August 26. Condolences to the families of the victims who died in the line of duty, but let’s start referring to this incident as what it really was. A false flag attack. The Biden regime is attempting to provoke Russia and China into fighting an unwinnable proxy war against ISIS in Afghanistan. A Sino-Russian expedition into the “graveyard of empires” would be risky at best, but the alternative might be worse. Jihadists armed and trained by NATO could overpower the tenuous Afghan government and launch a new wave of terrorist attacks across Eurasia.

I have visited Afghanistan three times. The third and final time I visited was in the summer of 2016. By then, all the gloating of previous years had worn off. Our nation-building exercise was obviously doomed and anyone not being deliberately dishonest knew this. There was little high-intensity conflict: ISAF and Taliban forces were locked in an uneasy stalemate. The Taliban’s opium trade was operating more or less in the open, while ISAF sat in ivory towers. I saw some low-level fighting (via video feeds) and there was even a Soviet-era rocket fired in the general direction of the base I was sitting in. I would summarize what I saw there as a status quo with neither side making a serious effort to change it. Americans wanted to get home alive, and there was no compelling reason for Taliban fighters to die either. By this point, it was just a waiting game, and the Taliban was going to win it.

First, let’s review the chain of events leading up to the Kabul airport bombing.

The Fall of Kabul and Lessons From It

Taliban forces assumed control of Kabul on August 15 of this year. America’s withdrawal was an embarrassing disaster, and that’s putting it politely. The American intelligence community wildly misread the situation all the way to the bitter end. Afghanistan’s puppet government fell within days, rather than months. American forces abandoned their local “allies” in the dead of night, and the US embassy was evacuated Saigon-style. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country with as much money as he could, leaving behind entire pallets full of cash on the airfield. Most Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) declined to fight, and who can blame them?

Thousands of ISAF, UN, and NGO workers and their families found themselves stranded. American students and teachers on field trips were caught in a volatile country with no diplomatic support. That episode can be written off as poor decisions on the schools’ part, but the US Defense and State Departments could have avoided most or all of these disasters with better planning. They chose not to. American conservative political figures funded “rescue missions” to get people out. The State Department tried to take credit for at least one of these rescues, but ended up humiliating themselves even more. Ukraine chartered a plane to rescue some of her citizens, just to have it bribed out from underneath them and flown to Iran instead. Meanwhile, some British soldiers escaped Afghanistan by disguising themselves as women.

In the aftermath, there are some clear lessons:

The fall of Afghanistan wasn’t a war, but it isn’t correct to call it a surrender either. The Taliban negotiated with their neighbors and rivals to form a coalition, and these efforts were largely successful. This success is self-evident. If government soldiers feared retaliation against themselves or their communities, surely they would have at least tried to fight. The absence of resistance was consent to the Taliban’s authority.

British soldiers disguising themselves as women was a ridiculous thing to do and shows how laughably disconnected ISAF was from the population they were supposed to be ruling. A burqa isn’t a clever disguise, except maybe in a cartoon for children. Conservative Afghan women are expected to behave a certain way. It probably takes a lifetime to learn and cannot be copied by an outsider. I refuse to believe those British blokes fooled even one person.

To build on that previous point, the cross-dressing British soldiers could have retained their uniforms (and dignity) and simply walked out. I see no compelling evidence that the Taliban intended to harm them, or harm any foreign nationals at all. Quite the opposite, diligently assuming guard duty outside embassies and compounds is a sign of wanting to safeguard foreigners, not kill them. Put aside dogma for a moment and look at these events from a position of neutrality. The Taliban desperately need to gain credibility and lynching NGO workers isn’t the way to do that.

I have seen many hysterical news reports of local collaborators being extrajudicially murdered, but I’m not even sure that most of those are true. When an “atrocity” springs out of thin air in the English-speaking media and doesn’t have any clear origin in the local language, or at the very least video evidence, it can usually be dismissed as false. I don’t think it is even possible to commit a crime out in public without at least one person recording it with a cellphone camera; especially in an urban setting like Kabul. Even during state-sanctioned public executions where photography is forbidden, somebody in the crowd still usually manages to sneak a social media video. People will do literally anything for clout!

And yes, apparently the Taliban has executed some people, but so has the USA. Western journalists must be very young or have very poor memories if they don’t remember when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney made a ghastly public spectacle out of hanging Saddam Hussein. We can hardly claim the moral high ground on that one. The media’s crocodile tears are particularly sickening because these same ambulance chasers squeal in delight whenever an enemy of the USA is killed in a drone strike.

Of course Kabul wasn’t, and still isn’t, a safe place. But there still was not a plausible reason for American forces to abandon their embassy. Both Russia and China left their embassies open, making the American evacuation look even more absurd. Incidentally, the enormous task of evacuating foreign nationals fell on the Russians, so it helps to still have an embassy in Kabul. Three more planes arrived today.

As strange as the Biden Administration’s decision-making was at the time, it makes more sense now in hindsight. American forces were trying to inflict as much chaos and instability as possible.

The Suicide Bombing was Manufactured Consent, but not for the USA

The suicide bombing outside Kabul airport made no sense. Why would ISIS want to attack an enemy that was already retreating? Why would ISIS want to waste valuable soldiers and supplies on an already-defeated foe instead of conserving their strength for future fights? The only goal this attack accomplished was manufacture consent to reinvade Afghanistan. But will that happen? While it is a possibility that the USA will reinvade, I don’t think it is a likely one. If the Biden regime wanted to continue to fight in Afghanistan, they wouldn’t have withdrawn in the first place.

Secondly, look at the Western media and the narrative they’re spinning. According to CNN, BBC, and the other usual suspects, America’s 20-year adventure in Afghanistan was a complete success, and Joe Biden is the brave leader with the guts to make the tough decision to bring our boys and girls home. The Biden regime would not have ordered journalists to produce this propaganda unless the plan was to get out and stay out. Reinvading now would defeat the narrative our corporate media has spent months crafting, so I will be honestly astonished if that happens.

Also consider Biden’s response to the suicide bombing. Just days later an American drone killed the villain who helped orchestrate the attack. The Western media celebrated revenge and accepted the Defense Department’s story without question. As Glenn Greenwald spelled out in his video here, it was all a baldfaced lie. Corporate news outlets have declared themselves the definitive fact-checkers, then spread every lie that the American government spoonfeeds them. In reality, the victim was a former ISAF interpreter. Despite the constant barrage of media lies that there were no civilian casualties, the blast killed nine of his family members as well. The Pentagon further claimed that explosives in the victim’s car caused “powerful secondary explosions.” Again, a lie. The secondary explosion was a nearby propane tank. Despite the massive loss of innocent life and the obvious lying, Pentagon officials investigated themselves and determined that they did nothing wrong.

Corporate media outlets continue to howl about Russian “election interference” years after that story was conclusively proven to be false, and still refuse to correct their debunked lies about Putin putting “bounties” on American troops. Imagine if they put even one-tenth of that effort into demanding accountability for a drone strike that killed ten innocent people and zero terrorists. The Aug. 29 drone strike was at best incompetence. But there is a more serious, and I think more likely, explanation. The innocent man’s family was a prearranged target so the Biden regime could quickly declare victory and divert public attention elsewhere.

Now some writers argue that Trump and Biden defied the wishes of the military-industrial complex by pulling out of Afghanistan. While that’s an interesting theory, I really doubt it. Again, and I cannot say this enough, if American oligarchs wanted to stay in Afghanistan they were perfectly capable of making that happen. The withdrawal was an institutional decision, not the actions of a maverick president. I might be proven wrong, or our oligarchs might change their minds, but I think it is safe to say the odds of such a thing are very low.

Presently, ISIS forces have allegedly spread to every province of Afghanistan. This is indeed manufactured consent, but not for the USA. It is a calculated provocation against Russia and China.

ISIS-K Are the New Mujahideen

As I stated earlier, by 2016 it was obvious even on the ground level that the Afghanistan nation-building project was a total failure. The Taliban couldn’t be stamped out and the Afghan people would never accept an imperialist puppet government.

But something else was happening at the same time.

We are in the middle of a new Cold War, with an arguable start date of 2008, when Russia intervened in Georgia. The Cold War escalated even further in 2014 with the Ukrainian Maidan Revolution.

In 2015, Russian forces officially intervened in Syria (though remember that there were Russian personnel in Syria to begin with, and have been since the 1970s). This was the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that Russia was willing and able to project significant military power beyond her borders. This development spelled trouble for the West. Since 1991, and especially after 2001, NATO has compulsively overthrown governments and spread instability across the world. Iraq, Libya, and of course Afghanistan. Regime changes are much harder now that there’s another powerful nation-state to support countries the West is trying to destroy.

As for the China, they have undeniably become a superpower that can, at least economically, challenge even the USA. They also have their Roads and Belts Initiative to Afghanistan, and have declared the Taliban a partner in making it happen. The Russian media is drowning China with praise, like this borderline erotic love letter from Russia Today. At the end of the day, however willing the Chinese are to invest in foreign nations, there is little historical basis for the idea that they’ll intervene in Afghanistan militarily, even if that means sacrificing their ambitions there.

The USA has little plausible motivation to directly provoke China either. Despite all the theatrics about Taiwan and Muslims in China, there is a lot of economic codependency for a war, even a proxy war. However, a war isn’t impossible. On a related note, rumors about China having gold reserves in the USA are apparently false. At least according to this article on FXEmpire. I don’t know anything about gold reserves, but it does seem a little silly for China to keep gold in a foreign country, especially the USA, which is famous for repeatedly stealing other people’s money and then refusing to ever give it back. Including Afghanistan, by the way. However unlikely hostilities are, the Chinese are pragmatic enough to not make ties with America that couldn’t severe down the road, if need be.

If by 2015-16 the Afghan war was determined to be clearly unwinnable, there may have been a calculated shift in long-term strategy. Afghanistan couldn’t be conquered, but maybe it could be destroyed. Liberal Democracy Inc. could turn Afghanistan into a permanent failed state that continues to be a stumbling block against America’s rivals for decades to come.

Then ISIS-K sprang up. As early as 2017 there were complaints from numerous parties that the American military was transporting ISIS militants to Afghanistan. Of course that could be a lie manufactured by people who don’t like the USA, but the list of aggrieved parties included, ironically, our own puppet government in Afghanistan. Apparently, Ghani himself was quite infuriated that his imperialist overlords were instigating a terrorist uprising right under his own feet. He probably couldn’t understand why Americans would want to destroy the government they just spent well over a decade building at enormous expense. Or maybe he did know. Ghani went full circle. Die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain. Or live long enough to become a puppet that’s outlasted his usefulness. Ghani saw how this game was played with the mujahideen that he himself supported in the 1980s and 90s. Now it was the same game and he was on the wrong side of the table.

An armed intervention to Afghanistan by one or more members of the Shanghai Security Council is an ugly idea. Soldiers would die, there would be civilian casualties, and it would all be very expensive. China might help a little, but as I already said there is little precedent for such a thing so Russia would be pulling most or all the weight once again. They would also have to take the bait while fully aware that it’s an obvious trap. It’s also not the only trap. They’re still tied up in Syria, and there are growing NATO provocations in Ukraine, Georgia, and now against Belarus as well. Trying to juggle an adventure in Afghanistan along with everything else could end disastrously.

They also must be aware that any level of Russian economic and military intervention in Afghanistan can be matched by NATO, which seems to already be happening as ISIS-K attacks intensify. Russia can wait until violence spills over the border, or try to contain the situation early. Either way, Western outlets will howl at “Russian aggression.” There is nothing worse than Russian aggression (even Hitler was not that bad. He was just misunderstood, apparently), so the USA can take the gloves off and openly sponsor terrorism, like in Syria and Iraq. It is a true damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Hopefully I’m being overly pessimistic, but I have a feeling that I’m not.

Ian Kummer

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