Janine Jackson interviewed Phyllis Bennis, director of theNew Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, about the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan for the August 20, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Many people in this country and around the world have long been calling for the US military to get out of Afghanistan. Many, of course, the same people who opposed the 2001 invasion in the first place. Now that President Biden has made that call, what might happen next? What responsibilities does the US still have in and to Afghanistan? And what can we hope for, in terms of the possibility of the Afghan people taking charge of their future?
We’re joined now by Phyllis Bennis. She directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and is author of Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on Terrorism and Ending the US War in Afghanistan:A Primer, among other titles. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.
JJ: As events in Afghanistan are evolving quickly, I will note that we’re recording Tuesday, August 17. And I would start, just as you do in your new piece for The Nation: We have a lot of questions right now about what’s going to happen. But what can we say about what we’re seeing in Afghanistan, and what may come next?
PB: I think that it’s very important that we recognize the significance of pulling out US troops, and the limitation of pulling out US troops. The significance is that this is a war that never should have been waged. The horrific crimes of 9/11 should have been dealt with as international horrific crimes, and not as the beginning of a global war, in which the US interests would be asserted as taking precedence over the interests of every other country, every other people, in the world.
And once it started, it should have ended. Once it was going for a year, it should have ended. Once it went for 10 years, it should have ended. It’s finally ending now, almost 20 years on. That’s way too late. But it’s important that it is ending, the US role.
The limitation of that is that this does not end the struggle, and potentially even war, in Afghanistan. The war is going to be very different without the United States. But people in Afghanistan have a very difficult time ahead. Certainly the people who are afraid of what Taliban control could mean for them and their families personally, because of either their real or perceived connections to the US military, to US intelligence, and to other perceived and accurately known as Western institutions, whether it’s journalists, whether it's non-governmental organizations, all kinds of people. Women who’ve fought for women's rights over these last 20 years, many of them are very afraid of being linked to the US occupation and targeted for that, as well as being targeted for being strong women with an independent streak at all.
So there’s a lot of problems ahead for Afghans. Pulling out the US troops, I think, was the most important part of it.
JJ: It’s been odd to see some in the US news media lay the entire state of affairs at Biden’s feet, as though everything was going great somehow until he mucked it up. But you explain in The Nation that there are things that we can and should be demanding of the US government now. We can’t undo what the US military did to the Afghan people. But there are things that we can be talking about right now, in terms of accountability.
PB: Absolutely. And I think accountability to the people of Afghanistan should remain our focal point for this next period. First, the number of refugees, asylum seekers, should be massively expanded. We have to expand the categories of people who are allowed in. And, crucially, we have to make it easier, make it possible for people to apply for and get that protection. It’s a huge challenge now, because people that are not already in Kabul may not be able to get to Kabul anytime soon. People in Kabul may have trouble getting to the airport.
But it’s also made harder because the United States, unlike every other country, is not simply opening their borders to people who clearly need protection. They’re demanding that people still fill out all kinds of paperwork that may not be possible right now. So we need to demand that they make it easier, that they make it possible, for people to apply for asylum, for refugee status, for protection, in any way that it becomes necessary.
Second, we need to be sure that the bombing raids, both of planes, including B-52s, and drones that have been carried out in recent weeks, have stopped, and that the end of those bombing raids is permanent. The same for the CIA squads that are running death squads throughout Afghanistan. That should be permanently ended, not just at this moment, ready to come back from over the horizon.
Third, we need to be supporting UN and whatever other international efforts emerge to create and defend a humanitarian corridor, guaranteeing safe passage for humanitarian workers to get people in and to get access to water, food, shelter, medicine, for people that are living now in Kabul and other places who have been displaced from their homes, can’t get to their homes, and are stuck wherever they are in desperate need.
That has to include funding a massive program for Covid assistance. We've all seen the videos, the photographs, of people crowded together, living on streets in Kabul, etc. And these people are smack in the middle of a rising number of Covid cases already. This could become another disaster facing people in Afghanistan.
Phyllis Bennis: "We need to begin the process of acknowledging US responsibility for the impact of the war, the devastation that the war brought to the people of Afghanistan."
And finally, finally, Janine, I think it’s so crucial, even though it will be a long process, to assess what was wrong about this war from the beginning, why it was so easy for people to support this war, and why people in positions of power consistently supported it, with so few exceptions, like that of the heroic congressional representative from California, Barbara Lee, who was the only member of Congress to vote against the authorization for this war. That’s going to be a long process.
But in the meantime, we need to begin the process of acknowledging US responsibility for the impact of the war, the devastation that the war brought to the people of Afghanistan. We can work on that for years, the issues of reparations and compensation, questions of apology. But right now, we need to move towards acknowledgement that there was a US responsibility for what faced the people of Afghanistan during these 20 years.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally: Media have a lot to account for, I think, here. News media just have a "war" frame of mind, if you put it that way. Diplomacy, it seems, is almost treated as a weakness. And that’s exactly the kind of conversation we need to be having. But I fear that folks are going to be poorly served if we’re looking for that kind of healthy conversation about the future for the Afghan people in mainstream news media.
PB: I think you’re right that the news media, the mainstream news media, need to have some serious conversations. And we in the public need to demand those answers for the role that the media played for 20 years, from the moment of the 9/11 attacks, assuming the legitimacy of war as an answer.
I do have a small hint of optimism, based on the coverage of the last few days. Because there has already started to be some looking back. There’s been a couple of articles, not a lot. But you do see hints in the Washington Post and the New York Times and on NPR. Not enough, not nearly enough. But the beginnings of a more self-critical look, not necessarily at the media itself—
JJ: Right.
PB: —but at the assumptions that were at the root of how the media covered all this, which comes back to the question of the legitimacy of war as the dominant component of how US influence around the world is expressed. And to the degree that we can force that conversation to go further, that will be one of the key things to prevent something like this horrific invasion, occupation, 20-year oppression of Afghanistan that our country was involved with from ever happening again.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her article, “Washington’s War in Afghanistan Is Over. What Happens Now?” appears inTheNation.com. Thank you, Phyllis Bennis, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
