I have such a vivid memory of a long-planned anti-globilization movement protest in Washington DC in late September 2001. Lots of people didn't come; those that did acted in the face of bellicose USA! USA! jingoism emanating from The White House a week before the US invaded Afghanistan.

Bread & Puppet Theater organized a procession of 20 foot tall puppets of women carrying children's bodies, moving slowly, dramatically collapsing to a drumbeat every block or so to convey the message that innocent people will die. It was breathtaking in its reality, and residents of DC stared, captured by the spectacle, as I was.

That nightmare has come true, and worse. After the U.S. spent $300 million per day to dominate Afghanistan, the Biden administration has "withheld" -- called by normal people "stolen" -- $7 billion in Afghan funds held in the U.S.

Twenty years after the U.S. launched their invasion and war, the people of my long-suffering country are right back where we started. After trillions of dollars spent, and hundreds of thousands killed and displaced, the Taliban flag is once again flying over Afghanistan.

As the youngest woman elected to Afghanistan’s Parliament back in 2005, my experience reflects the failure of the U.S. and NATO war — a policy that used women’s rights as a pretext for occupation but only managed to empower the most corrupt forces in our society.

I survived several assassination attempts because I spoke out and condemned the presence of warlords and criminals in the Afghan government installed by the U.S. occupation. Then I was kicked out of Parliament entirely and forced to live an underground existence.

What the U.S. did to Afghanistan and its people is not a series of mistakes or good intentions gone awry, but crimes. And there's still no end in sight.

Speaking from the White House on August 31, President Joe Biden lied to the people of the U.S. and to the world: "Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan—the longest war in American history." The U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end—it has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that will be more politically sustainable, one more intractable and more easily exportable.

On the evening of Thursday, August 26, hours after two suicide bombs were detonated at the gates of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport killing and wounding scores of Afghans trying to flee their country, U.S. President Joe Biden spoke to the world from the White House, “outraged as well as heartbroken.” Many of us listening to the president’s speech, made before the victims could be counted and the rubble cleared, did not find comfort or hope in his words. Instead, our heartbreak and outrage were only amplified as Joe Biden seized the tragedy to call for more war.

Twenty years after bombing its way into Afghanistan with the promise of ending Taliban rule, running al Qaeda out, and defending women's rights there, the U.S. is scrambling to leave. The Afghan government, a creation of US fantasy, has collapsed; the Taliban is back in power. having accumulated most of the weapons the US littered the country with. Losses to the people of Afghanistan are incalculable, and in no way over.

NO ONE who is paying attention should be at all surprised, even though we remain outraged at the murderous US response to 9/11. The imperialist aims of the U.S. blind its leaders so that they are shocked when they don't prevail.

Debra Sweet | April 23, 2021

The political and military leaders who run the U.S. have real problems in the Middle East. Twenty years of their "war on terror" has failed to establish U.S. control over the region and only spread and strengthened Islamic fundamentalism. Just one of their justifications for attacking Afghanistan - to exact revenge for 9/11- was true, though completely unjustified. The others, to establish "democracy," to "save the women," to end "terrorism," were always designed to satisfy those who think "America equals the good guys."

Biden has been forced to conclude that the U.S. can't "win" this war. The U.S. entered in 2001 with almost no translators who spoke local languages, ignorantly killed local forces who were trying to aid the U.S., tortured and killed prisoners at the notorious U.S. airbase in Bagram and killed hundreds of civilians in night raids and with drones. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking...”  This aggressive, imperialist war has been a disaster for the people of Afghanistan. For one example, women in Afghanistan still have one of the highest maternal death rates on the globe.

Marjorie Cohn, Truthout | January 6, 2019 

Politicians and pundits alike have roundly criticized Donald Trump for stating he will pull our troops out of Syria and cut US forces in Afghanistan by half. James Mattis immediately resigned as secretary of defense, writing in a letter to Trump, “you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”

As the US military kills civilians in Syria and CIA-led Afghan forces continue to commit war crimes, it appears Trump is doing the right thing in pulling out military troops. But the CIA will remain and grow stronger after the US troops leave. “[A]s American military forces are set to draw down, the role of the Central Intelligence Agency is only likely to grow in importance,” according to The New York Times.

Yes, Afghanistan is  in our sights as people who care about humanity.  

And yes, the people of Afghanistan and the whole region are in the gun sights of the most destructive military force on the globe, commanded by a regime under the rubric of "America first."

23 November 2015. A World to Win News Service. The biggest political protests Afghanistan has seen in years took place over several days in early November. A large crowd (10,000 people according to the New York Times) marched across the capital to the presidential palace, where they chanted "Death to Taliban, Death to Dash" (Islamic State) and called on the government to resign.

This war and occupation has never been about “protecting the American people,” or about “freeing Afghanistan” from the feudal Taliban.

President Obama’s announcement that he will cease U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan exposes the utter futility of forcing American style “democracy” on noncompliant populations. Troop levels will remain at somewhere near 10,000 through the end of Obama’s term of office, ostensibly to train local forces to replace the imperial forces of occupation.