The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold - Tariq Ali
Published in 2021 by Verso, Brooklyn, NY and London, UK
272 pages
ISBN: 978-1-83976-817-0
On August 15, 2021, US President Joe Biden fulfilled the obligations set under the Trump administration and pulled the last troops out of Afghanistan. After twenty years of meandering in the country without a clear goal (under the guise of “nation building”), the Taliban swiftly took over the capital of Kabul. Within one week, the president of Afghanistan had fled the country, with the Taliban acting as the de facto leaders of Afghanistan. Needless to say, the withdrawal was botched, resulting in the deaths of thirteen US service members.
Keen to find an easy scapegoat for this humiliating defeat, conservative and liberal media outlets alike lambasted Biden’s strategy, insisting that the US occupation is still necessary under the justification of “protecting Afghan women’s rights.” Although it received relatively little attention in the preceding years from the press, political pundits and talking heads on Twitter suddenly became overnight experts on Middle East foreign policy. Citizens across the country signaled their support for the military and anger toward the administration through a variety of empty gestures, such as pouring thirteen beers to honor the fallen soldiers. Biden’s favorability numbers plummeted dramatically and have still yet to recover.
Yet, within the span of a few weeks, everyone had seemingly forgotten about Afghanistan. In yet another example of our myopic vision and stunted memories, the bloodthirst and rage that seethed through both social and traditional media had largely quelled. A war that had raged on for the majority of my life had finally come to an end with the US’s predictable defeat. For many younger Millennials and Zoomers, the American War in Afghanistan has occupied the bulk of our lives, if not its entirety. This is true of the average Afghan citizen as well, whose average age in 2022 is only eighteen years old. Yet, every step of the way, there have been minority voices who have been skeptical of the continued occupation of Afghanistan, whether by the Soviet Union in the 1980s or by the United States in the 21st century.
One of the most prominent and persistent voices of this skepticism has been British writer and political activist, Tariq Ali. A member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and author of more than two dozen books, Ali has been writing from an anti-war, Leftist perspective since the Vietnam War. In his latest book, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold, Ali collects a variety of essays on the occupations of Afghanistan that he’s written from the 1980s to the present day. By following the various invasions, occupations, coups, and political turmoil that the Soviet Union and America have imposed over the past forty years, we get a clear picture of Ali’s consistent condemnation of foreign interference in Afghanistan.
Overview:
In this collection of essays, Ali traces the continual occupation of Afghanistan over the past forty years, beginning with the Soviet invasion in 1979 and ending with the US withdrawal in 2021. Through each essay, Ali utilizes critical analysis and acerbic humor to break down the common arguments that have been used to justify foreign presence in Afghanistan, arguing that the self-serving interests of the United States, Russia, and NATO have only served to create further divisions and religious extremism in the country (including the Taliban). These decades of destabilization have followed a familiar pattern, as each country keeps repeating the same mistakes as the others as they sacrifice thousands of lives into “winning” nebulous wars and waste endless resources on vague projects of “nation-building.”
While many commentators have blamed the failure in Afghanistan on a lack of follow-through on state-building initiatives, Ali provides a useful counter-narrative by arguing that the Western nation-building project itself was the source of tremendous ire. Over and over again, Ali’s observations and predictions turn out to be eerily accurate. Whether he is warning about the Soviet Union’s fatal folly of invading Afghanistan (the Soviet Union dissolved only two years after they withdrew), fearing the assassination of various officials, connecting the intertwined relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan, or predicting the disastrous withdrawal of US troops from the country, Ali proves to be a clear and prescient thinker. Throughout these contemporaneous accounts that he has penned through the decades, Ali consistently argues against the occupation of Afghanistan.
One of the most persistent themes of the book is the consistent incompetence and shortsightedness of those in the reigns of power as Russia, the United States, and NATO repeated the same mistakes time and time again, resulting not in the liberation and freedom of the Afghan people, but rather stoking the rise of extremist movements. In one of the earliest examples of this, Ali recounts an interview by Carter’s national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, in which the interviewer asked Brzezinski if the United States regretted giving weapons to future terrorists, where Brzezinski dryly replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? A few crazed Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” (25).
Along with his critical analysis, Ali also brings a sharp and biting sense of sardonic humor to these essays. Further on in the book, there is an entire chapter that consists of the correspondence between Ali and the then-UK Trade Minister Mike O’Brien MP in 2003. Their exchanges are cordial, yet become ever-more tinged with annoyance with one another (although expressed in an eminently polite, repressed way that only the British have truly mastered). Ali insists that the nation-building project has not been well-executed, money has been misappropriated, and the war will likely end badly, just as the Soviet intervention did in the ‘80s. O’Brien opens his response to Ali, writing, “So scathing, so cynical, so wrong,” (58) before concluding his correspondence with “You present no alternative policy, merely rhetorical fireworks, sparkling but fleeting…The difference remains that my responsibility as a minister is to deliver, while your responsibility as a writer is to criticize. My record will be measured in the improvements in the lives of Afghans, yours in influencing public opinion about Labour” (65). Obviously, following what actually happened in the years after this correspondence, Ali’s inclusion of this exchange serves as a cheeky “told-you-so” to O’Brien and the rest of New Labour.
Ali begins and ends the book with an analysis of the current state of Afghanistan in the wake of the US withdrawal, as well as what the future of the region might look like under Taliban rule. Regarding the future of the country, Ali writes, “Have no doubt, Beijing will replace Washington as the capital of importance for Afghanistan. Since China enjoys warm relations with Iran, we can hope that they will discourage Hazara-Pashtun rivalries that might lead to bloodshed” (208). He also hopes that the youth of Afghanistan will strive for a better life after this long and bloody conflict and that women will continue to struggle “even if only a single enemy remains” (ibid).
Finally, in a charge to Britain and the rest of the NATO nations, he writes, “all those who want to fight on must shift their focus to the refugees who will soon be knocking on NATO’s door. At the very least, refuge is what the West owes them: a minor reparation for an unnecessary war” (ibid). At the end of the day, the wars in the Middle East have resulted in the death of millions, the waste of trillions of dollars, the displacement of large swaths of the population into refugees, and the reactionary rise of far-right parties in Europe and extremist militants in the Middle East. According to Ali, under the guise of freedom and democracy, these wars clearly have a “grim and bloody balance sheet” (206).
Commendations:
First of all, as someone who had heard of Ali but was unfamiliar with his work, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan is a great introduction to his writing. This book is essentially a sample of his work concentrated on the occupation of Afghanistan over the past four decades and gives the reader a fantastic glimpse into Ali as a thinker. Ali is a witty and insightful writer, and he employs both beautiful prose and sardonic humor in equal measure. There is a wave of righteous anger in Ali’s writing, which is often balanced by
When anyone takes up the task of writing about current events, it is easy for one’s perspective and opinions to age poorly, especially as events unfold in unpredictable ways. Despite this ever-present danger, however, Ali’s observations and predictions regarding the outcome of the war were incredibly prescient and accurate. Ali clearly has a vast knowledge of the conflict and its implications and has more often than not been proven right in his admittedly cynical forecasts.
Ali is particularly adept at connecting the intricacies of Iraqi, Syrian, Pakistani, and other Middle Eastern political entanglements, which vividly illustrates how each event in one region invariably impacts the other. He deftly connects historical context with personal conversations and observations that he’s had over his years of being a political activist and journalist, while also filling each essay with so much colorful detail, which helps to paint the occupation of Afghanistan into a brutally honest and grisly picture. For those who are only vaguely aware of the conflicts in Afghanistan, this book will serve as a fantastic way to fill in the gaps.
Critique:
On the other hand, for someone who is completely unfamiliar with the context and intricacies of the occupation, it will probably take a little bit of time to acquire a solid footing. There is a large cast of historical actors listed throughout this book, and without some larger context, some introductory readers might feel lost at times. To be sure, the book will reward the curious reader who, upon not finding immediate familiarity with the context, looks up the events that Ali describes to get the basic gist of what Ali is responding to in these various essays. This might be especially true for younger readers who might not remember the earlier years of the war in Afghanistan. For example, I was just a small kid when the United States invaded Afghanistan (8 years old), and while many of the events in the book are vaguely familiar, I had to do a little bit of research on my own in order to get more information on the order of events that occurred.
Otherwise, the biggest drawback of this book is that, since it is a collection of essays written over the course of four decades, many of the arguments and recounting of events can get a bit repetitive and tedious at times. The book was clearly hastily compiled in order to get it published by the time the US finally withdrew from Afghanistan, which makes some of the selections of essays seem a bit arbitrary and unnecessary at some points, especially when certain sections of different chapters seem to almost verbatim repeat themselves.
Conclusion:
Overall, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan is a timely and beautifully compiled collection of essays addressing the Soviet and American occupation of Afghanistan, and the deleterious effects that it has wrought over the past four decades. Balancing acerbic humor and justified rage, Ali’s writing helps us to make sense of the wars in Afghanistan that have cost so many lives. Ali illustrates the ever-common effects of imperialism and the cycle of violence upon which our neoliberal order so intricately depends.