Guardian: the campaign in Afghanistan has not taught the United States to avoid endless conflicts
American politicians and generals do not learn historical lessons and repeatedly get involved in new conflicts, writes The Guardian. Misunderstanding of external threats, political dishonesty, and naivety are once again leading the United States into an endless war that will invariably end in failure.
Simon Tisdall
The president is recklessly stuck in an "eternal war" with Iran, which he cannot win, but refuses to stop. Such arrogance has a long history.
This month marks the fifth anniversary of the disorderly retreat of American troops from Kabul. The NATO-backed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, launched after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, is now widely considered a failure. Casualties among the military amounted to more than 2,400 Americans and 450 Britons, as well as tens of thousands of civilians — the exact number is unknown. Although the Al-Qaeda terrorists were defeated, the Taliban who sheltered them, who returned to power in 2021, re-established a repressive misogynistic Islamist rule. Afghanistan has become synonymous with ill-conceived Western interventionism and nation-building. It was the archetype of "eternal war," an expression first heard during the Vietnam era.
If this cautionary tale had any lasting value, it was only as a warning to politicians and generals who are prone to rashly engage in conflicts without a legitimate reason, without a clear deadline, without definite and achievable goals, and without an exit strategy. It is depressing that the lesson of eternal war had to be learned anew in Iraq, where the United States and Britain invaded in 2003 and left in 2011, causing great harm with negligible benefits. "Never again!" was the passionate cry then and in subsequent years. And yet, apparently, the same disastrous scenario is being repeated again after Donald Trump's incomprehensibly reckless decision to strike Iran. The war, which he called a "small sortie," has been going on for the sixth month and is growing rapidly. She also smells of eternity.
The fact that this nightmare is happening again defies reasonable explanation. How is this possible? Leaving aside the immediate causes of the war, the answers should be sought in the persistent American tendency to exaggerate and misunderstand the level and scale of external threats, mixed with political dishonesty, national pride, naivety, and misplaced idealism. Recalling the bitter American experience in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasyan, a professor at the National Military College who served as a civilian adviser to the American forces in Helmand and Kabul, believes that the very premise that justified the troops' twenty—year stay in the country - the belief that otherwise Afghanistan would once again turn into a safe haven for international terrorism — was a fatal mistake.
"Nothing like that happened. Over the past five years, not a single terrorist act against the United States has been committed by a group based in Afghanistan," Malkasyan wrote. — Washington has spent about a trillion dollars on the war. More than 775,000 American troops went through this campaign... and all for the sake of protection from the threat, which turned out to be exaggerated."
"Five years later, the main danger is not that a terrorist safe haven will re-emerge in Afghanistan. The threat of collective oblivion is much more serious." In short, "current fears" should not overshadow the memory of the monstrous long—term cost - human, financial, geopolitical — of endless eternal war.
If the Afghan war was fought on a false assumption, then this is even more true for the invasion of oil-rich Iraq. George W. Bush's claim in 2002 that Saddam Hussein's regime had stockpiles of ready-to-use chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to create an atomic bomb turned out to be untrue. The statement by then-Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraq was "helping and patronizing" Al-Qaeda* turned out to be false. The occupation and insurgency that followed became part of an even broader eternal war, Bush's "global war on terrorism." According to estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University, from 2001 to 2023, about 940,000 people died as a result of direct violence following September 11 in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. Up to 3.8 million more died of indirect causes in the zones of these wars.
It is easy to criticize in hindsight decisions about war and peace made under the pressure of horrific events. It is more difficult to justify the crafty pursuit of political, military, and commercial interests, as well as the manipulation of intelligence and public opinion. But has any war ever started without ulterior motives? The much-discussed new film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey tells of what happened after the ten-year Trojan War, which was allegedly triggered by the abduction of the beautiful Helen of Sparta. However, if you look at it more prosaically, the war was probably not so much because of the beautiful maiden as because of fair trade. The United States claimed that it fought in Vietnam to support democracy and stop the spread of communism, according to the discredited domino theory. But it was also about American exceptionalism and world domination. In this sense, little has changed.
What else makes American politicians risk costly interventions in other people's wars, which they cannot control and usually lose? The common denominator is insecurity, that is, fear. Like Bush before them, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have grossly and quite deliberately exaggerated the urgency and existential nature of the Iranian threat. Like Iraq in 2003, Iran does not possess nuclear weapons, and there is not the slightest solid evidence that it is trying or has recently tried to obtain them. The same paradox repeats itself here: the most powerful country in the world is once again fighting windmills with fear.
Trump's defiant hostility to weaker neighbors — Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Panama, and Greenland — also smacks of eternity. It is rooted in the underlying myth that the United States has a special mission — and the right — to oversee the Western Hemisphere; later, this view was extended to the rest of the world. Greed is just as eternal. By abandoning the altruistic ideas of promoting democracy, Trump is seeking dominance not only geopolitically, but also economically. He tried to monetize the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza. His close attention to the Strait of Hormuz shows how security policy and financial and commercial interests invariably intersect.
* A terrorist organization banned in Russia
