Shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush posed a famous question: “Why do they hate us?” Bush gave his own simple answer: “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” But in a 1997 interview with a CNN journalist, the actual mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden, had offered a different answer to the question of “why they hate us.” His explanation did not mention “our freedoms” or “voting.” Instead, bin Laden said that his jihad was because “the U.S. government…has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal,” both “directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation” of Palestine. “The mention of the U.S.,” he says, “reminds us before everything else of those innocent children who were dismembered, their heads and arms cut off in the recent explosion that took place in Qana.”[1]
Few Americans probably remember the Qana massacre, which took place in Lebanon in 1996. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fired artillery shells at a United Nations compound where 800 civilians were taking shelter (having been ordered to flee their homes by the IDF); 106 civilians were killed in the attack, of whom half were children, plus 120 more injured, including 4 UN workers. An Associated Press report from a year after the event conveys a small sliver of the human toll: “Lina Taqi, 7, walks with a limp, moves her left arm with difficulty and rarely speaks. Her father is dead.” She was “but one of the lives shattered a year ago when Israeli artillery slammed into a UN peacekeeping base packed with civilians.” Lina’s eight-year-old sister was killed, with “shreds of her pajamas” all that was left. Lina herself underwent six months of treatment for a shrapnel wound in the head, and would never recover the full use of her limbs. According to her mother, she would wake up at night “shaking, lost and hallucinating, sometimes wetting herself.”[2]
An investigation by the United Nations secretary-general’s military adviser concluded it was unlikely that the attack on the compound had been a mistake. An Amnesty International investigation found that “the IDF intentionally attacked the UN compound” despite having been informed of its position and the presence of sheltering civilians. Indeed, soldiers who were part of the Israeli artillery battery that launched the attack confessed later to the press that “no one spoke about it as if it was a mistake,” saying “it was war” and the victims were “just a bunch of Arabs.” The United Nations General Assembly took the modest step of voting to charge Israel for the financial costs of the damage to the UN base. The United States and Israel were the only states to vote against the resolution. Israel refused to pay the damages, saying that the Lebanese brought the cost on themselves.[3]
After the September 11 attacks, in an open “letter to America,” bin Laden again gave a similar justification when answering the question “Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple…. Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.” Bin Laden cited, foremost, U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the “oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation” that have taken place there. “The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.” Bin Laden listed other grievances, most of which related to U.S. foreign policy: “steal[ing] our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats,” “support[ing] the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya,” supporting “the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir,” and killing Iraqi children through economic sanctions.[4]
Bin Laden attacked America for hypocrisy, saying that the United States claims the right to possess weapons of mass destruction while denying that others have the same right, and Americans are “the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of International Law, yet…want to selectively punish anyone else who does the same.” He asked: “How many acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?” After listing his foreign policy grievances, bin Laden condemned American morality. He complained that we had “destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases” and refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. He accused us of “exploit[ing] women like consumer products.” He professed abhorrence at American acceptance of “President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office,” and our perceived tolerance of drug use, gambling, and sex work. (He does not acknowledge the Republican Party’s stalwart efforts to advance his social agenda.)
Bin Laden’s letter is certainly deranged, and drips with explicit anti-Semitism. (Bin Laden claims that “the Jews have taken control of your economy” and are “making you their servants,” which is “precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.” Franklin’s supposed warning that “the Jew” is a “great danger for the United State of America” has long been known to be a forgery.[5]) His justification for attacking civilians is unpersuasive—he says that in a democracy, ordinary citizens are responsible for the government’s acts, making it fair to treat them as representatives of government policy. (He ignores the U.S. government’s efforts to keep citizens in ignorance of its policies through propaganda.) He claims divine support for the archaic principle of vengeance: “Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns…we have the right to destroy their villages and towns.” But while bin Laden was undoubtedly fanatical and homicidal, it is clear from all his public commentary that the 9/11 attacks cannot just be attributed to violent religiosity. The basic thrust of his argument is that 9/11 was an act of justified revenge, that his violence against the United States was to repay violence by the United States.
Bin Laden’s brutal extremist tactics were fringe and entirely unrepresentative of the Muslim world. But anger at the United States was shared by others. A few days after Bush declared that they “hate our freedoms,” The Wall Street Journal ran a series of stories that investigated the question seriously, interviewing Muslims around the world about their views on the United States. The interviewees were elite professionals. They were often pro-U.S., but shared a “perception that unlimited American power is propping up hated, oppressive regimes.” Anger at the U.S. came from “America’s alleged double standard in defending Israel’s occupation of Arab lands while continuing to hit Iraq with economic sanctions and military attacks for what some Muslims consider essentially the same behavior.” The reason “the U.S. arouses such passion and anger in the Muslim world, among all segments of society,” is that its diplomacy “has seldom lived up to its cherished ideals.”[6] Thus “even wealthy businesspeople are growing tired of what they see as a U.S. double standard.” Said a Qatari engineer, “We don’t have anything against the Americans as Americans, but these rulers are supported by the Americans.”
John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, said “this is not a clash of civilizations but a clash over American foreign policy.” Esposito said that many in the Muslim world, including “businesspeople who deal with the U.S. all the time,” hoped the attacks would cause the United States to rethink its policy toward the Middle East. In 2005, David Gardner of the Financial Times similarly reported that many in the Muslim world thought that 9/11 would make it “impossible for the West and its Arab despot clients to continue to ignore a political set-up that incubated blind rage against them.”[7]
George W. Bush was not alone in preferring a more comforting story and creating an explanation for the attacks that would prevent Americans from having to scrutinize their government’s policies. On September 16, 2001, The New York Times’s Serge Schmemann explained that the attackers acted out of “hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage.” These “fundamentalists” saw in America a land of “licentiousness, corruption, greed, and apostasy” and the Twin Towers as symbols of “Sodom and mammon.” Absent was any discussion of the actual grievances listed by the perpetrator.[8]
Understanding the roots of terrorism does not justify it. In fact, those who are the most opposed to terrorist acts will do the most to try to understand their causes, in order to prevent future violence.
The horrifying atrocities of September 11, 2001, were something new in world affairs. Not since the War of 1812 had the United States been attacked within its national territory. (The case of Pearl Harbor is frequently cited as an exception, but Pearl Harbor was a military base in a colonial outpost. Hawai‘i did not become a U.S. state until nearly two decades later, and the comparison between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 is analogous to the difference between an attack on a military installation in British-occupied India and an attack on London.) The United States is used to doling out violence against the people of other countries, not being on the receiving end of it.
The 9/11 attacks could have been dealt with as a crime. This would have been sane and consistent with precedent. Invading the country of the perpetrator is an atypical response to lawbreaking. When the IRA set off bombs in London, nobody called for air strikes on West Belfast (or on Boston, where a great deal of IRA funding came from). When the Oklahoma City bombing was found to have been perpetrated by a white supremacist associated with ultraright militias, there was no call to obliterate Idaho or Montana. Instead, the attacker was searched for, found, apprehended, brought to court, and convicted.
This was not the approach taken by the Bush administration. Rather than seek out and punish the guilty—and only the guilty—it launched a “global war on terror,” beginning with the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and its coalition partners, and then expanding, that led to the deaths of millions.[9] Brown University’s Costs of War project found that the post–9/11 wars led to the deaths of nearly 1 million people through direct violence and an additional 3.6–3.8 million in indirect deaths, with 38 million people becoming displaced—the largest mass displacement since World War II.[10]
After the attacks, the Bush administration demanded that the Taliban, then ruling in Afghanistan, immediately hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States. The Taliban, in response, offered to put bin Laden on trial, if the United States provided evidence of his guilt. Bush refused. Nor did he consider the Taliban’s offer to give up bin Laden to a neutral third country. His demand, he said, was nonnegotiable. He would not provide evidence (in fact, he had none at the time). He would not enter into talks. Historian Carter Malkasian notes that Bush did not instruct his secretary of state, Colin Powell, “to open a line to the Taliban to work things out, which would have been the normal diplomatic course of action to avoid a war.”[11]
In fact, long before 9/11, the Taliban had reached out to the United States and offered to put bin Laden on trial under the supervision of a “neutral international organization,” but the United States government showed no interest and did not respond. Milton Bearden, a CIA station chief who oversaw U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s, told The Washington Post after 9/11 that the Taliban had long been signaling to the United States that they “wanted to get rid of” bin Laden, and probably “set up bin Laden for capture by the United States,” but the United States responded to the signals with threats. Relations between the Taliban and bin Laden were, in fact, “deeply contentious,” and they had repeatedly placed him under house arrest.[12]
Instead of entering into extradition talks with the Taliban, Washington immediately demanded that Pakistan eliminate “truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population,” and caused the withdrawal of aid workers along with severe reduction in food supplies, thereby leaving, as Samina Ahmed of the International Crisis Group noted, “millions of Afghans…at grave risk of starvation.” Despite sharp protests from aid organizations and warnings of what might ensue if the United States bombed the country, there was little discussion of the possible humanitarian consequences of such actions for Afghans.[13]
In the first week of October 2001, Bush launched “Operation Enduring Freedom,” sending a “powerful barrage of cruise missiles and long-range bombers against Afghanistan” to try to destroy the Taliban’s government. “The Taliban will pay a price,” he declared, calling the attacks “carefully targeted.” This was not the approach favored by many scholars of terrorism, who had been “caution[ing] against a quick-hit military response,” encouraging “police work and prudence” instead. In Foreign Affairs, military historian Michael Howard made the sensible suggestion that the response should be “a police operation conducted under the auspices of the United Nations…against a criminal conspiracy whose members should be hunted down and brought before an international court, where they would receive a fair trial and, if found guilty, be awarded an appropriate sentence.” But Bush himself, according to neoconservative writer Robert Kagan, “wanted vengeance.” Colin Powell got the impression that the president “wanted to kill somebody.” Indeed, on September 20, Bush told religious leaders in the Oval Office: “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust.”[14]
Against one of the poorest countries on Earth, as Malkasian writes, the United States sent “F-15E strike fighters, carrier-based F-18C fighters, black B-2 stealth bombers, and 40-year-old Vietnam-era B-52G/H bombers…the propeller-driven AC-130 Specter gunship…carried a 150mm cannon, 25mm Gatling guns, and 40mm cannons…akin to a flying artillery battery. Manned aircraft were joined by new Predator drones.” U.S. forces were soon running out of targets to bomb, because “the Taliban had few headquarters and little infrastructure to hit.” Veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn commented that “what the Americans never explain in Afghanistan or Iraq is why they are using weapons designed for World War Three against villages that have not left the Middle Ages—which makes heavy civilian casualties inevitable.”[15]
After the bombing began, the Taliban again offered to enter talks about turning over bin Laden, on condition that the United States stop bombing the country. (They gave up the demand to see evidence of bin Laden’s guilt.) The Taliban labeled the bombings a “terrorist attack,” and the number of Afghan civilian deaths from the war quickly exceeded the three thousand deaths in the September 11 attacks themselves. A Human Rights Watch account from the end of October documented horrific bombings of remote Afghan villages, where residents “were adamant that there were no Taliban or Al-Qaida positions in the area.” One forty-year-old mother lost her husband and all six of her children in one of the U.S.’s “carefully targeted” bombing raids. U.S. bombs struck facilities of the UN and the International Red Cross—killing multiple workers and “all but wip[ing] out the [International Red Cross’s] sole complex with supplies of food and blankets for 55,000 disabled Afghans”—even though the United States had been given the locations of the facilities beforehand.[16]
NPR reporter Sarah Chayes, who filed from Afghanistan at the time, says that “the bombing was traumatizing the Afghan civilians whom it was supposed to be liberating,” and the Afghan refugees she talked to “could think and talk of nothing else,” having gone “mad with fear.” Chayes writes of “the anguish [she] heard every day—the pleas to tell President Bush, for the love of God, to stop the bombing,” but says that U.S. media at the time was reluctant to broadcast negative news about the war, with a CNN correspondent claiming to have been told not to film civilian casualties. An editor at NPR even accused Chayes of “disseminating Taliban propaganda” and said her sources must be “pro–Bin Laden.”[17]
The wanton killing of innocent civilians is, of course, the opposite of a “war on terrorism.” It is terrorism itself. But U.S. officials reacted with indifference. After a village was hit “with torrents of withering fire from an AC-130 aerial gunship,” killing dozens of civilians, a Pentagon official remarked “the people there are dead because we wanted them dead” and “we hit what we wanted to hit.” (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented: “I cannot deal with that particular village.”) Another village was wiped out in October by two thousand pounds of explosives, which missed the Taliban but killed one hundred innocent people.[18]
Afghan opponents of the Taliban were appalled by the bombing. Abdul Haq, one of the main leaders of the anti-Taliban opposition forces, expressed his vehement objection, saying that the United States “is trying to show its muscle,” but didn’t “care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.” Haq argued that the American bombings were actually undercutting the efforts of anti-Taliban forces. He was not alone in his view. In October 2001, a meeting of hundreds of tribal elders and other anti-Taliban Afghan leaders unanimously demanded an end to the bombing, which, they declared, was targeting innocent people. Although they hated the Taliban, they urged that means other than slaughter and destruction be employed to overthrow the regime. It was “a rare display of unity among tribal elders, Islamic scholars, fractious politicians, and former guerrilla commanders,” the press reported. They had many disagreements but unanimously “urged the U.S. to stop the air raids” and appealed to the international media to call for an end to the “bombing of innocent people.” They urged that other means be adopted to overthrow the hated Taliban regime, a goal they believed could be achieved without further death and destruction.[19]
The leading Afghan women’s rights organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), issued a declaration on October 11, 2001, strongly opposing the “vast aggression on our country” by the United States, which will shed the blood of innocent civilians. The declaration called for “eradication of the plague of the Taliban and al-Qaeda” by the “uprising of the Afghan nation,” not by a murderous assault of foreign aggressors. They added that “despite the claim of the U.S. that only military and terrorist bases of the Taliban and Al Qaeda will be struck and that its actions would be accurately targeted and proportionate, what we have witnessed for the past seven days leaves no doubt that this invasion will shed the blood of numerous women, men, children, young and old of our country.”[20]
Donald Rumsfeld disclaimed U.S. responsibility for any civilian deaths, on the grounds that “we did not start this war.” This meant, he said, that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda [sic] and the Taliban.” The statement was, of course, ludicrous: the Taliban had not attacked the United States, and the United States had launched the war itself in clear violation of international law. Bush himself scoffed at the notion that an unauthorized invasion of a sovereign nation was a criminal act, saying, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” (The applicable legal standard is that violence in self-defense is justified only in the case of armed attack, and must still be approved by the UN Security Council. The United States did not seek the approval of the Security Council, even though it would “probably” have obtained it, in all likelihood because this would have established the principle that the United States has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence, which the Bush administration did not believe.) In fact, there were no credible grounds for the invasion whatsoever, meaning that on Rumsfeld’s principle (whoever starts a war is responsible for every casualty), all violence that occurred as a consequence of the U.S. attack would be the responsibility of the U.S.[21]
The Taliban were toppled within six weeks and offered to surrender. Donald Rumsfeld declared, “We don’t negotiate surrenders,” and in November’s Bonn conference, which aimed to produce a political settlement for the country, the Taliban were excluded from negotiations. Masoom Stanekzai, a senior adviser in the postwar Afghan government, later called the failure to include the Taliban a “historic mistake,” and Carter Malkasian says “the mood of the time overrode wiser diplomacy.” That mood, according to the leader of the U.S. delegation, was: “They have been defeated. Why should they be included?” Rumsfeld “vetoed any peace with the Taliban,” warning new Afghan president Hamid Karzai that “any deal” accommodating the Taliban “would be against U.S. interests.” Malkasian notes that “this narrow and inflexible approach contravened diplomatic wisdom to bring adversaries into a post-war political settlement,” and set up the long war that followed. When Karzai brought up the earlier Taliban peace feelers, the Bush administration banned negotiations, even giving a “blacklist” of people that the Afghan government was forbidden from talking with. Afghan American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad believes “America’s longest war might have instead gone down in history as one of its shortest had the United States been willing to talk to the Taliban in December 2001.”[22] Foreign Service officer Todd Greentree, who worked in Afghanistan, says the U.S. “violated the Afghan way of war,” under which “when one side wins, the other side puts down their arms and reconciles with the side that won.”[23]
The Bush administration had, of course, given little thought to the actual consequences of overthrowing the Taliban. Malkasian notes that there were no “significant investments in reconstruction, economic development, and institutions,” and Ambassador Ryan Crocker summarized Rumsfeld’s attitude as: “Our job is about killing bad guys…[once] we have killed the bad guys, who cares what happens next?” This was not a war to bring democracy or women’s rights to Afghanistan, both of which were an afterthought used to justify the calamity in retrospect.[24]
In fact, Bush swiftly lost interest in Afghanistan. Plans to invade Iraq had started on September 11, 2001. The very afternoon of the day of the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld asked the CIA to produce “best info fast” so that he could “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [bin Laden].” When asked about the hunt for bin Laden in March 2002, Bush replied, “I truly am not that concerned about him,” a comment he later denied having made. Bush indicated that since bin Laden was no longer “running Afghanistan,” he was not a priority. (Of course, not only had bin Laden never come close to “running Afghanistan,” but the Taliban had found him a nuisance and offered to give him up.)[25]
Once Bush’s attention was fixed on Iraq, the Afghanistan war was treated as unimportant and its mission was ambiguous. (There had never really been one, besides the desire to avenge the deaths of 9/11 victims by killing some people who resembled the people suspected of being responsible.) According to a memo from Donald Rumsfeld, when Rumsfeld asked the president if he wanted to meet “with General Franks and General McNeill,” Bush replied, “Who is General McNeill?” and Rumsfeld had to explain that “he is the general in charge of Afghanistan.” Bush replied, “Well, I don’t need to meet with him.”[26]
Plenty of money was funneled into Afghanistan. Adjusted for inflation, the amount spent exceeded Marshall Plan aid to Western Europe after World War II. At one point “the U.S. government was pumping roughly as much money into Afghanistan as the undeveloped country’s economy produced on its own.” But as Craig Whitlock writes, much of that money might as well have been set on fire: “U.S. officials wasted huge sums on projects that Afghans did not need or did not want. Much of the money ended up in the pockets of overpriced contractors or corrupt Afghan officials, while U.S.-financed schools, clinics and roads fell into disrepair due to poor construction or maintenance—if they were built at all.” In fact, “much of the American money enriched U.S. contractors without ever entering the Afghan economy.”
Whitlock explains that what the U.S. did build with that money was a “corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that depended on U.S. military power for its survival.” Corruption was so bad that, according to the UN, by 2012, half the population was paying bribes for services, producing billions of dollars in bribes per year. According to the Institute of World Politics, militias “were using their position and closeness with the government and [the] U.S. military to control roads, secure lucrative contracts, establish themselves as regional powers, and sometimes serve both sides, cooperating with both international and Taliban forces to maximize profits.”[27]
In 2009, Rodric Braithwaite reported in the Financial Times that among “Afghan journalists, former Mujahideen, professionals, people working for the ‘coalition’ ” who should be “natural supporters for its claims to bring peace and reconstruction,” there was in fact “deep disillusionment with the ‘coalition’ and its policies.” Unsurprisingly, many joined the Taliban because they saw the Americans as illegitimate invaders and the Afghan government as a U.S. puppet.[28]
Whitlock notes the basic problem that “by allowing corruption to fester, the United States helped destroy the legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.” The U.S.-trained Afghan Local Police were “unaccountable militias that prey on the population,” and “quickly earned a reputation for brutality and drew complaints from human rights groups.” They were “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan, and one official “estimated that 30 percent of Afghan police recruits deserted with their government-issued weapons so they could ‘set up their own private checkpoints’ and rob people.” In addition to the predatory police, there were many “ghost” police—those who were on payrolls but didn’t exist. Whitlock writes that while “the Afghan army and police forces looked robust on paper…a large percentage materialized as ghost billets, or no-show jobs,” because “Afghan commanders inflated the numbers so they could pocket millions of dollars in salaries—paid by U.S. taxpayers—for imaginary personnel, according to U.S. government audits.”
New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins says that none of this was a secret, and everyone in the U.S. government “knew that the Afghan government was predatory,” calling it “VICE,” for a “vertically integrated criminal enterprise.” But Patrick Cockburn reminds us that some of the corruption came from desperation: “The police make about $120 a month…. The only way they can feed their families is to take bribes.” Afghan soldiers and police were also doing dangerous work. At one point, an estimated thirty to forty were being killed each day, to the point where “the Afghan government kept the exact numbers a secret to avoid destroying morale.” In 2019, researchers concluded that “more than 64,000 Afghans in uniform had been killed over the course of the war—roughly eighteen times the number of U.S. and NATO troops who lost their lives.”[29]
NPR’s Sarah Chayes wrote that the “security concerns of the Afghans” were very different from the “security concerns of the foreigners.” American and NATO forces fretted about “former Taliban” while “the Afghans were worried about the quite real depredations of the government those Americans had put in power.” She was critical of those who believe Afghans were simply unprepared for democracy. In fact, they simply wanted a government that was competent and didn’t rob them. They were “crying out” for democracy, she said, and “want to participate in some real way in the fashioning of their nation’s destiny,” but were “getting precious little of any of that, thanks to warlords like Gul Agha Shirzai, whom America was helping maintain in power.” U.S. policy, she said, was in fact “standing in the way of democracy.”[30]
Chayes is bitterly critical of the United States for supporting some of the most brutal Afghan warlords, such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, who suffocated hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war to death in shipping containers. Akbar Bai of the Turkic Council of Afghanistan described Dostum as “the biggest butcher and criminal in the world,” who “raped many people, men, women, even young girls and boys,” and is accused of having ordered the murder of his former wife after she found him having sex with an underage girl. Dostum became “America’s man in Afghanistan” and was placed on the CIA payroll. In the U.S.-backed government, Dostum ultimately became vice president of Afghanistan, though his presence in office was so embarrassing that the Obama administration felt obligated to bar him from visiting the United States. Dostum ultimately fled the country to escape “criminal charges in Afghanistan for having ordered his bodyguards to rape a political opponent, including with an assault rifle.”[31]
As Whitlock shows, much of the truth was kept from public knowledge. The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said there was an “odor of mendacity” to all government statements. This began under Bush, but Whitlock writes that Obama staffers “took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious, or downright false.” In 2011, Hillary Clinton told the Senate that “life is better for most Afghans,” citing statistics showing increases in school attendance, decreases in infant mortality, hundreds of thousands of farmers who had been “trained and equipped with new seeds and other techniques,” and a hundred thousand microloans given to Afghan women. Yet “government auditors would later conclude that the Obama administration had based many of its statistics regarding infant mortality, life expectancy, and school enrollment on inaccurate or unverified data.” The special inspector general said the administration “knew the data was bad” but used it anyway out of a desire to present a false picture of progress. Whitlock says, “Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the White House and Pentagon would spin them in their favor,” with any outcome presented as a win. For instance, suicide bombings were “a sign that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat” while “a rise in U.S. troop deaths proved that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.”[32]
With WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Logs in 2010, many instances of previously unreported horrific violence by the United States and its coalition partners were disclosed to the public. In the words of The Guardian, what were presented as targeted strikes on “Taliban militants” were often “bloody errors at civilians’ expense,” including the time “a U.S. patrol…machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers.” There were numerous other incidents that were reported to have killed Taliban, but in fact killed innocent civilians.[33]
There were even more extreme atrocities, such as an Army staff sergeant’s massacre of sixteen villagers in Kandahar province. An Australian soldier alleged to have murdered an Afghan teenager was accused in court of boasting: “I shot that cunt in the head…blew his brains out. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” In 2015, in one of the most horrifying events of the war, a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship—call sign “Hammer”—attacked a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, burning patients alive in their beds and killing a total of forty-two people. (Doctors Without Borders had provided the United States with the GPS coordinates of the trauma center beforehand.)[34]
Further humiliating and alienating Afghans was the practice of torture. As James Risen of The Intercept reported, the United States set up secret torture chambers and “tortured both Afghans and foreign prisoners flown to these torture rooms from all over Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.” They “were hung by their arms for as long as two days, slammed against walls,” or “forced to lie naked on tarps while gallons of ice water were poured over their bodies,” with at least one person dying from the frigid temperatures. Risen notes that “no one was ever held to account for the American torture regime in Afghanistan.”[35]
The use of armed drones produced yet more nightmarish results. The New York Times reports that “even inside the government, there is no certainty about whom it has killed,” and “every independent investigation of the strikes has found far more civilian casualties than administration officials admit.” Brandon Bryant, an Air Force drone operator who became a critic of their use, says the killing of a small child is “burned into my brain.” He believes “total civilian deaths were much higher than the administration’s estimate,” because they’re “deluding themselves about the impact.” Those attacked have included dozens of pine nut farmers and a wedding party. Every time these horrors unfolded, U.S. officials “insisted that each strike had hit its intended target, while ignoring the claims of villagers that the missiles had killed a tribal chief or decimated a meeting of village elders.” (Not everyone came out badly: U.S. defense contractors have made fortunes, and a massive drone industry has blossomed.)[36]
Of course, U.S. crimes against Afghans fueled support for the Taliban. Risen notes that “night raids,” in which “U.S. and Afghan forces would burst into a home in the middle of the night and kill or capture those inside,” bred so much resentment that “they sometimes led an entire village to switch its allegiance to the Taliban.” Journalist Anand Gopal has identified eleven specific Taliban leaders who had left but rejoined the group “because of some kind of U.S. or government harassment.” Malkasian notes that “overly aggressive and poorly informed U.S. counterterrorism operations upset Afghans and drove former Taliban back to violence.”[37]
Successive U.S. presidents continued to deny the facts while continuing the war. Whitlock observes that Barack Obama pretended to have ended the war, without actually doing so. Under Donald Trump, the war “had become much less visible to Americans at home” yet was reaching “new levels of mayhem on the ground, killing and wounding record numbers of Afghan civilians.” Trump escalated the indiscriminate violence, and infamously dropped the “Mother of All Bombs,” the most powerful conventional explosive ever used in combat, killing a number of ISIS fighters as well as a teacher and his young son, and causing Hamid Karzai to condemn the “inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as testing ground for new and dangerous weapons.” Desperate to end the United States’ costly commitment, Trump signed a deal with the Taliban that promised U.S. withdrawal if the Taliban would agree to, among other things, stop attacks on U.S. and coalition forces. The agreement was made without the participation of the Afghan government—one American official described the prevailing attitude as “Who cares whether they agree or not?”—and helped set the Taliban up to take over the country.[38]
Like Trump, Biden simply wanted to get out of Afghanistan, to take the political hit and move on. He ordered a quick but disastrous exit that abandoned many Afghans who had been core U.S. allies. The New York Times’s Dexter Filkins says that this was obviously “inexcusable” and “criminal,” since those Afghans “fought for us and they risked their lives and many of them died for us and we have left thousands of them behind.” But he concludes that the Biden administration simply didn’t think it was “worth it” to put in more effort or expense, the lives of Afghans having been considered negligible to U.S. presidents since 2001.[39]
In 2021, after twenty years, the United States fired its last missile in Afghanistan. It massacred an aid worker and seven children. The U.S. military initially called it a “righteous strike,” claiming it had hit terrorists who had a bomb. After a lengthy New York Times investigation revealed the government was lying, the Pentagon backtracked and called the killings a tragic mistake. Nobody was punished.[40]
With its mix of gruesome violence against innocent Afghans, brazen propaganda from U.S. officials, and total impunity for the perpetrators, it was certainly a fitting American end to the war.
The condition of Afghanistan after the U.S. war was appalling. The World Food Program warned at the end of 2021 that 98 percent of Afghans were not getting enough to eat, with millions facing starvation. By September 2023, the WFP claimed that they were nearly out of resources and were “obliged to choose between the hungry and the starving, leaving millions of families scrambling for their next meal.” News reports out of Afghanistan are heartbreaking. There has been a significant rise in child labor as kids are sent to work to help feed families, doing jobs like picking through garbage. Some parents have been forced to sell one of their children in order to afford to feed their other children. Others have had to sell their own organs, or their children’s organs.[41]
This horror was directly the fault of the United States. After the Taliban took over the country in August 2021, the United States froze $9 billion in Afghan central bank assets, which “functionally cut the country off from many foreign banks and left the Central Bank of Afghanistan unable to access its reserves and shore up the country’s cash flow.” The Biden administration announced that it was going to give half of the Afghans’ money to American families related to the victims of 9/11—though the people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11, of course. It’s an act of outright theft, as Ruth Pollard of Bloomberg notes: “The problem is, the U.S. doesn’t own that money: Afghanistan does.” The New York Times makes the understated observation that it is “highly unusual for the United States government to commandeer a foreign country’s assets on domestic soil.”[42]
Representatives of leading Afghan women’s organizations wrote an open letter to Joe Biden decrying the injustice of the decision, pointing out that “the funds that the U.S. seeks to redistribute belong to the Afghan people, who were not responsible for the acts of Al Qaeda terrorists or the Taliban” and arguing that the “decision by the world’s most powerful country over the resources of the world’s poorest country is extremely unfair.”[43] They pointed out that “thousands of Afghans have died every year in what was called the ‘war on terror’ by the U.S. and allies” and “taking funds from the Afghan people is the unkindest and most inappropriate response for a country that is going through the worst humanitarian crisis in its history.”[44]
Obaidullah Baheer of the American University of Afghanistan described extreme anger at the decision, for the obvious reason that “Afghanistan needs a sustainable economy if it is to survive in the long run, and the federal reserves are fundamental to it.” Naser Shahalemi, founder of End Afghan Starvation, is appalled by the horrific humanitarian situation. “The people of Afghanistan are starving, and they are locked out of their funds. They cannot access their bank cards. They cannot access their bank accounts…because of the sanctions, they’ve been locked away from their own money…it is absolutely ridiculous because we need that money for the people of Afghanistan.” (The Biden administration ignored the pleas and continued to refuse to release the money.)[45]
The effects of U.S. policy have been “catastrophic for civilians,” notes Laurel Miller of the International Crisis Group. “The West’s immediate steps to isolate the new regime triggered Afghanistan’s meltdown.” David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee wrote that “the current humanitarian crisis could kill far more Afghans than the past 20 years of war.” Mark Weisbrot concludes that the “Biden administration did not end the war, but continued it by other means, which are turning out to be more violent and destabilizing.”[46]
Nor did we facilitate an escape from the hell we created. The Biden administration rejected over 90 percent of applications from Afghans seeking to enter the United States on humanitarian grounds. The administration imposed differing standards on Afghan refugees and Ukrainian refugees—for instance, “unlike Afghans trying to secure entry to the U.S. on humanitarian grounds, Ukrainians don’t have to pay a $575 administrative fee, don’t need to show proof of vaccination and don’t need to have an in-person consular interview with a U.S. representative.” (Public opinion research shows Afghan refugees are seen less favorably, perhaps partly thanks to press coverage depicting Ukrainians as “civilized” refugees who “look like us.”)[47]
If we are even minimally morally serious, we should ask: What does the U.S. owe the people of Afghanistan, after all that we have done to them? If we actually believed the story we tell ourselves about being “the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known,” how would we act?
We might begin with a few obvious changes. To deny applications from Afghan refugees is unconscionable. Laurel Miller recommends “beginning to lift sanctions on the Taliban as a group (leaving sanctions on some individuals and an arms embargo in place); funding specific state functions in areas such as rural development, agriculture, electricity and local governance; and restoring central-bank operations to reconnect Afghanistan to the global financial system.” Sanctions punish the population for the crimes of its government, and have no justification.[48]
The Afghanistan war is often discussed as a kind of noble failure, another episode of the United States’ good intentions going hopelessly awry. For Barack Obama, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes, Afghanistan was “the good war, the war that began with two fallen towers, not the war that stemmed from faulty intelligence and exaggerated claims of weapons of mass destruction.” In fact, the attack on Afghanistan was a major crime, with no justification whatsoever. Neither the Afghan people nor their authoritarian Taliban government had planned or executed the 9/11 attacks (in fact, the Taliban publicly condemned the attacks and called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice).[49]
Why did the United States attack Afghanistan, then? Bush wanted to “show muscle” in the aftermath of the attacks. Michael Howard described it as the American desire for “catharsis” and “vengeance” against an “insult to American honor,” which would not have been satisfied by a “long and meticulous police investigation.”[50] The desire to strike back and prove strength is not an uncommon motivation in the history of U.S. foreign relations. It is more mafioso logic—using extreme violence as a means of asserting strength and discouraging opposition.
Why did we stay in Afghanistan? In part, because no president wished to “lose,” even as it was increasingly clear that the U.S.-backed government could not command the popular support necessary to survive on its own. As Patrick Cockburn observed in 2012, “The problem for Washington and London is that they have got so many people killed in Afghanistan and spent so much money that it is difficult for them to withdraw without something that can be dressed up as a victory.” Regardless of the “true” motives behind the war, from Bush to Biden, American presidents have shown no sincere commitment to improving the welfare of the Afghans.[51]
There are still those who defend the noble intent of U.S. policymakers. Carter Malkasian, while acknowledging the terrible consequences of U.S. refusal to engage the Taliban diplomatically or care about the consequences of their overthrow, frames the war as a “terrible trade-off” between American and Afghan well-being. “It was inadvertent,” he says, and “we resuscitated a state of civil war so that we could sleep a little sounder at home,” exposing Afghans to harm in order to protect Americans.
Destroying one of the world’s poorest countries to “sleep a little sounder” may sound a harsh enough indictment, but Malkasian is wrong. If the Bush administration had wanted to “defend Americans from another terrorist attack,” it would have pursued the criminal network responsible for the original attack. Instead, it wanted vengeance, and launched an illegal war that killed thousands of innocent people. As ugly as a “trade-off” between Afghan lives and American safety would have been, there was no such trade-off. Bush rapidly lost interest in bin Laden, American muscle having successfully been flexed. The damage was not “inadvertent”—armed drones do not spontaneously deploy of their own volition. It was born of indifference to the humanity of our victims.
Most depressingly, while those looking to redeem the crime of the Afghanistan war might point to progress on women’s rights and infrastructure during the Taliban’s absence, it is quite possible that had the United States never invaded, the Taliban would not be in power today. They were unpopular by 2001; Patrick Cockburn reports that “the brutality of the Taliban and their obsession with controlling people’s private lives meant that they had long outlived their welcome” because “even those fond of innocent pleasures such as kite-flying were rewarded with a beating or even prison.” A major source of the Taliban’s renewed strength was their ability to portray themselves as freedom fighters against a government associated with American occupiers. Abdul Haq had insisted that the U.S. was actually undermining the anti-Taliban resistance through its bombing campaign, and if the U.S. had left the country alone, that resistance might someday have been able to build a government with popular support. The U.S. may well be the main reason that Afghans suffer indefinitely under strengthened Taliban rule.[52]