As the U.S. hightailed it out of Kabul in August, it left behind a people battered by 20 years of U.S. arrogance, bombing raids, corruption, lies, torture, hollow promises, covert alliances, unexploded weapons and an ever-mounting Afghan death toll.
Happy-talking U.S. generals, who repeatedly promised that the war was winding down, actually stepped up the carnage in 2017, when the Trump administration relaxed the rules of engagement for airstrikes. This was done to gain leverage in coming negotiations with the Taliban; the cost was a 330% increase in civilian deaths.
It seems the more Washington talked of peace, the more Afghan blood was shed.
U.S. taxpayers funded this conflagration of suffering, but it was the politicians, generals, and military contractors who walked away from Kabul with fancy careers and trillions in war profits.
In a just world, these war criminals would be forced to personally clear Afghan land of unexploded ordnance. Their checks would pay reparations for 240,000 Afghan war dead, including little children wrapped in scarves and laid side-by-side at grave sites. They would be forced to supply food, shelter, and medicine, all in short supply as Afghan winter approaches.
But that is not the world we live in … yet.
Today in Kabul, hundreds of left activists — feminists, journalists, socialists, and anti-Taliban, pro-worker secularists — are in hiding with their families, without means of support. The Freedom Socialist Party urges our readers to make a donation online and we will send it to the organization Left Radical of Afghanistan, which has appealed for our assistance.
The war is not over in Afghanistan. And neither is the fight for a world in which the many do not die for the profits of the few.
