This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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What the US exit from Kabul tells us about the value of Afghan lives

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

Those seeking evacuation have had to endure an onset of Taliban fighters and then the crush of thousands anxious to escape the Taliban. Once at the airport, they have faced a cruel bureaucratic process. Waiting in the open air for days, some forced to stand in a sewage canal, clinging to documents and a handful of belongings, civilians have been left exposed to extraordinary brutality.

The luckiest have made it on a plane. But many have faced new indignities when forced to wait in squalor in a make-shift facility in Qatar. At every stage, US passport holders have been filtered out from those holding Afghan passports or identity cards. The color of one’s passport is the difference between escape and potential death.

‘To the last Afghan’

The airport crisis dramatizes the stark reality of paperwork deciding one’s fate. But for Afghans, it presses upon a deeper wound, a profound sense of despair at how the world sees their worth. The chaotic policing of the airport gates shows proximity to Americanness, demonstrated by a US passport, or a special visa, to be the index of an Afghan person’s value.

For all the tragic urgency of these scenes, this calculus is hardly new. During the Cold War in the 1980s, Washington maintained a bipartisan consensus supporting Afghanistan’s Mujahideen rebels against the occupying Red Army. The US pressed the most brutal of them to fight “to the last Afghan”, even if they harmed Afghan civilians in the process.

Similarly, when the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in 2001, US strategy was always focused on American security interests. Despite lip service about women’s rights and democracy, American forces repeatedly bombed civilians. Relying on torture, night raids, and often rapacious Afghan allies, they terrorized and brutalized many rural communities. Yet these victims went mostly unnamed, their voices rarely heard.

The plight of Afghan civilians was not a central focus of international attention, either. Their steadily rising numbers proved impossible to ignore. Yet it was only in 2009 that the United Nations even began to count in a systematic way the number of civilian casualties.

When in 2009 the Obama administration shifted to a campaign for “hearts and minds”, American forces offered ‘condolence payments’ for survivors whose relatives they had killed or wounded. Some family members received as little as $131. Others received nothing.

Dehumanizing Afghans

It should also be recalled that since 2001, foreign commentators recycled dehumanizing stereotypes about Afghans. They portrayed Afghanistan as a primitive place stuck in ancient times. When the US and NATO strategies failed, observers doubled down on the ‘difficulty’ of Afghan politics. Not modern politics, but ‘tribalism’ became the go-to metaphor to explain this supposedly backward and crude society, a trope that President Biden repeated on 26 August, asserting that the country was “made up of different tribes who have never, ever, ever gotten along with one another.”
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/what-us-exit-kabul-tells-us-about-value-afghan-lives/
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