American Troops in Afghanistan

The withdrawal has begun, the media announced. Slowly, ever so slowly, so that it doesn’t look like what it really is — a defeat.

The invading American troops are retreating from Afghanistan. Regarding NATO, things are ambiguous, very ambiguous because the fissures in the military alliance in service of the empire are ever more evident. Look at what is happening in Libya, where today even the Italian prime minister, who claims to be against military aggression, says that his “hands are tied” by parliament — where he has an absolute majority.

It is said, of course, that a contingent of 800 marines has started the process of retreat. The truth is that nobody knows just what kind of withdrawal this is, how it is going to pan out, and what will be left behind — apart from American military bases — when the operation is declared to be at an end.

Obama has had to keep to the timetable that he established because now he is in another war, with the Republican majority in Congress, for having “forgotten” to ask their permission to continue attacking Libya for longer than 90 days. The Republicans, who harbor the most hawkish of American hawks and who are normally in favor of any war, with or without law, with or without a U.N. resolution, have had a resurgence of formalism. They have opened political hostilities because the president extended the duration of a war.

Elections are in sight! This retreat from Afghanistan is, above all else, a big point of contention. In some cases, however, there are already answers. The announcement of the start of the retreat is, without a shadow of a doubt, a confession of defeat of the empire and of NATO. Has the war ended? No. Has the Taliban been dismembered and deactivated? No, they are as active as they have ever been. Is Afghanistan a stable, democratic country at peace? No, the government installed by NATO is a den of corruption, governing little more than Kabul and having been installed through various electoral processes widely known to be fraudulent. Has the cultivation, production and traffic of opium and heroin been dismantled? No, the drug trade has never flourished like it does today in Afghanistan, a country that has acquired a 90 percent share of worldwide production, a monopoly cherished by those who are said to be economically anti-monopoly. At the end of these 10 years of “civilizing invasion,” is Afghanistan a single country, unified? No, the forces of disintegration have never been stronger, and apart from the natural zones of tribal influence, the separatist forces in some regions have never been as strong and active as now. It is true: Washington has nearly been able at the end of these 10 years to announce the downfall of bin Laden, the principal objective of the invasion, but not even this matter is clear. There is much more doubt than certainty.

Among the certainties, two are relevant: bin Laden really seems to be dead, apart from the unclear adventures of the corpse supposed to be his, and with this occurrence the United States has opened a front of conflict with Pakistan, its principal and decisive ally in the region. Apart from this, not much is clear in the withdrawal.

The United States now admits, a little mutely, that they are in negotiations with the “good” Taliban. But the Taliban, both the “good” and the “bad,” deny these negotiations completely, and if the American retreat really were a quick retreat, it would weaken devices that NATO is preparing there as national “security forces.”

This is the context of the announcement of the start of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan: Ten years, hundreds of thousands of dead and mangled, and millions upon millions of dollars later, the empire leaves unequivocally defeated and the “international order” becomes yet more discredited. Afghanistan, the world and humanity have only lost with this war. But there are those who have won and continue to win with it — from the defense industry to the drug trade.