To Understand War...Follow The Money

War Incarnate

By Luke Haines

Without having to be up-to-the-minute, it's safe to say that the current situation in Afghanistan is a blundering shitshow of historic proportions. 

 At the time of writing, American troops have pulled out of their twenty-year misadventure, the Taliban have re-taken the country at a stroll, thousands of refugees are desperately trying to flee on a very limited number of planes, and today someone has bombed the airport where these people were clustered. By the time you read this, things may have found ways to get even worse.

 There will be plenty of finger pointing to go around, of course. The Republican party will use America's embarrassing slinking away as a cudgel with which to beat Joe Biden. Biden, in turn, could point out that the departure date was set seemingly at random by Donald Trump with no forward planning. Trump would be within his rights to point out that Barack Obama had just spent eight long years plowing money and lives into an unwinnable quagmire, and Obama could rightly say that he inherited said quagmire from George W. Bush, who was stupid enough to start the war in the first place. 

 All of this, however, is very recent history, and therein lies the problem. Part of the reason that the west so frequently causes disaster in the Middle East is that western powers do not, will not, and probably cannot understand that part of the world. 

 For a little perspective, America is a little under two hundred and fifty years old. The United Kingdom took on that moniker in 1707, with the question of where Ireland belongs having been a point of contention ever since. Even if we acknowledge that the dominant power in the UK is England, England as a country is broadly agreed to have come into being in 1066.

 In Baghdad, another site of recent Anglo-American martial disaster, there is a building that has been inhabited since 6,000 B.C. 

 In the West, or the Global North, we talk about the "ancient Rome" of two thousand years ago, but the Middle East has buildings that have been occupied for eighty centuries. The idea that upstart empires like ours could erase thousands of years of complex history with some arbitrary border lines and bombing campaigns is nothing more than empty hubris.

 Indeed, the fact that Afghanistan is really a part of Asia and not a part of the Arab world should give us some idea of how cluelessly we blunder into these areas. Even the Arab world isn't the Arab world, with Iran, Iraq and Syria having historically been part of Persia. Most people in the white, western world don't know these things and don't care, and then seem surprised that we couldn't manage to force our will on cultures unfathomably more entrenched than our own. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to lump Afghanistan in with Iraq as the nebulous area we call "the Middle East," and also treat the respective wars as the two ugly sides of the same coin that they always were. Just be aware that I'm being lazy and crude and Anglo-centric when I do this. 

 With all of that very recent and ancient history out of the way, there is something interesting in the middle ground. Over the past hundred years, Afghanistan somehow developed a way of bookending empires. For some reason, over and over, Afghanistan has been where world powers go to die. 

 In 1919, the British abandoned their attempt to conquer Afghanistan in a defeat that heralded their coming loss of Empire and decline as a world power. In 1989, the Soviet Union abandoned their attempt to conquer Afghanistan in a defeat that heralded their coming loss of Empire and decline as a world power. In 2021, America left Afghanistan.

 What's interesting, in a depressing, history-book kind of way, is just how America failed. Whilst British and Soviet invasions could be read as exhausted world powers attempting to rejuvenate their fortunes and over reaching themselves, the American defeat was a mirror image - or perhaps just a symptom - of what is rapidly destroying America at home. Specifically, the gnawing cancer of unchecked capitalism. 

 Consider that, for years, reports have been published explaining that all of America's attempts at nation building were just smoke and mirrors. The U.S. government (and therefore, ultimately, the U.S. tax payer) poured billions of dollars into building schools that didn't exist, filled with imaginary pupils and fictional teachers. They paid for hospitals that were never built or equipped. The money just vanished into the ether. We don't know who has it.

 To return to Iraq, the ugly sister, for a moment: after Baghdad fell, the U.S. government shipped twelve billion dollars in cash to Iraq. Pallets of hundred dollar bills, loaded and shrink-wrapped in what is still the largest movement of cash in the history of American banking.

 Then they lost it. 

 Sure, some of it resurfaced eventually, in small quantities here and there, but most of it - literal pallets full of cash - just vanished, and remains unaccounted for.

 Both the Afghan and Iraq wars were ultimately nothing more than a shell game for persons unknown to transfer and launder unimaginable sums of money. 

 This is ultimately why the Afghan army were so effortlessly routed by the Taliban. There is a lazy, slanderous narrative that they didn't put up a fight. In truth, a great many Afghan soldiers gave their lives trying to hold the Taliban back. They were under-equipped, under-supported and they paid the ultimate price. To say that they "just didn't fight" is a callous insult to people who were braver than any of us. The problem, rather, lay in the fact that like the empty schools and unfinished hospitals, the building of the Afghan army was an exercise in lining the pockets of private interests rather than actually building a functional military. 

 The U.S. war machine's greatest strength is that it is an integrated military. An infantryman can call in an airstrike, for example. A tank commander can theoretically have someone fire a missile at a target from a war ship hundreds of miles away. What this means in practice is that every pair of boots on the ground has to have huge numbers of people working behind the scenes to ensure they have everything from food to bullets to satellite imagery to jet pilots who are waiting on call. This is a logistical nightmare, but it can be accomplished because of Uncle Sam's bottomless pockets, which hang down on either side of his insatiable war boner.

 The attempt to build an Afghan army on the American model was never going to work. Any idiot could have seen that. Moreover, much of the work in Afghanistan that served to support American troops was given over to Private Military Contractors - mercenaries who charged far, far more than the wage of a standard G.I. Once again, someone was getting rich off of this, and it sure as hell wasn't the Afghan people, but it wasn't the American troops who spent twenty years risking their lives, either. The soldiers got maimed or killed, the contractors got rich, and the Afghans didn't even get the hospitals and schools they were promised would be built, but which vanished as soon as the checks cleared.

 This relentless siphoning of money towards people in power at the expense and lives of the people at the bottom is what cost America the war, but is also what's costing America itself. The military industrial complex tells American citizens that peace is for pussies so they can send their kids to get their limbs blown off and become addicted to painkillers that cost hundreds of dollars to buy but pennies to manufacture, brought to market by the same companies that insist at home that universal healthcare is a sinister leftist plot. The same rich bastards who want Black Lives Matter labeled a terrorist group own arms factories that slaughtered people of colour by the thousands. Titans of industry blast themselves into space whilst thanking the exhausted minimum-wage workers who made it possible, and who will be fired if they dare to take a piss break, many of whom are immigrants that the same industrial titans help demonise by donating to whichever reactionary shithead populist looks most useful to them. Wealthy politicians insist that people return to work during a pandemic because, they admit without an ounce of shame, lives must be sacrificed on the altar of The Economy, as though the fate of the NASDAQ means anything to the people who are dying. As though Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam and the endless meddling of the CIA in South America had not ultimately all been part of the same game we now see played with Covid - letting the poor die so the rich can endlessly grow their fortunes.

 There's an old saying on the left that there is no war but class war. The richest people in the world, many of whose names we don't even know, won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for twenty straight years. The rest of us, the poor people, are the ones who lost. Regardless of nationality.

 

 *I am indebted to the work of Robert Evans, who has consistently provided insightful reporting into Middle East affairs, and who hosts (among other things) the podcast Behind The Bastards.

Copyright© 2021 Luke Haines 

About the author: Luke Haines is a British writer who currently lives in Wales - although as he is English he spends most of his time apologising. He can be found on Twitter at @lukedoughaines. Also, please visit his medium page here: lukehaines85.medium.com

The opinions expressed here are his own and may not reflect those of anyone else involved with this blog.