Despite the taking out of a prominent 9-11 planner, not much else is going well in Afghanistan or Iraq these days

 

The other day came news that Osama bin-Laden’s right-hand man, the principle planner of 9-11 and the de facto head of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, was killed in a CIA precision air strike in a balcony suite of a residence in a high-rent district in Kabul. The operation had been planned for months and was intended to avoid civilian collateral damage at all costs. The operation was a success, we are told, and al-Zawahri was the only one killed. Of course if Vladimir Putin had ordered this operation, hundreds of civilians would likely have been killed—even Russian civilians if it was conducted on Russian soil. Although al-Zawahri may have been the figurehead of the organization, he lacked the "charisma" of bin-Laden, and more violent offshoots like ISIS-K was the result.

Apparently al-Zawahri was hiding out for twenty years in Pakistan, where bin-Laden also found safe haven before he was discovered and taken out. We probably shouldn’t question why he was in Kabul, because we know that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda have been fist-in-glove partners since the 1990s. One of the “provisions” of the “agreement” signed off on by Donald Trump and his incompetent State Department headed by Mike Pompeo was that the Taliban would agree to end support for Al-Qaeda and deny the terrorist organization safe haven in Afghanistan.

This, as with every other “promise” made by the Taliban, was a foolish pipe dream from Day 1, but you never heard any pushback from Republicans or the right-wing media against the “agreement” until it came down to the unpalatable choice between accepting the agreement as a fait accompli—or sending in substantial U.S. forces back into the country to undo the disaster that was the Trump “peace” plan. Regardless of what Joe Biden decided to do, he was at “fault.”

It was a disaster in the making for months leading up to the signing of the “deal” in February 2020 and for almost a full year until Biden took office; the Trump administration agreed to halt airstrikes on Taliban positions, and this literally allowed the Taliban to infiltrate unmolested every corner of Afghanistan until it was too late to stop what would happen next. If the U.S. had decided not to leave the country, the Taliban would have used this as an “excuse” to renounce the “deal” and risen up in a country-wide attack that the U.S. and its token force could do little to counter without significant bloodshed.

The fact that the Afghan government fell so quickly was for those reasons and the fact that the military had been willingly providing misleading information on the ground that the political hacks in the Trump Defense Department were demanding, and that Trump was so eager to make a “deal” that he deliberately abandoned the Kabul government and left it voiceless in the negotiations, allowing the Taliban free reign to simply take over the country and wipe away 20 years of “progress” toward “democratic” and social reforms in the country.

Of course “progress” in Afghanistan was a relative thing, more likely to “take” in the larger urban areas than in the countryside where there was little government control. Thus the reality was that there was little if any loyalty to or support for the Kabul government, and without the backing of U.S. and NATO forces, the Afghan security forces melted away like  snowballs in Hell.  David Schanzer wrote in The Hill “Once the agreement was signed, the fate of the Afghan government was signed, sealed and delivered — the Taliban had practically won the war. There was no way that the government could possibly survive.”

Trump administration claims that the “deal” was “condition based” was a fraud, because for a year it allowed the Taliban to ignore the “condition” of negotiating a power-sharing agreement with the Kabul government in good faith, which it never intended to do in the first place. The Trump administration had telegraphed its decision to pull out of Afghanistan at any price, and for a year its “threats” to deal out of the agreement were just empty words. While Republicans roasted Biden in the aftermath of the delayed evacuation from Afghanistan, this was indeed more than a bit hypocritical, since if Trump was still president, they would not only have to come up with a “rationalization” for supporting the pullout, but also for the administration’s refusal to take in Afghan refugees (or very few of them) given Stephen Miller’s opposition to allowing an “infestation” of Muslim refugees into the country.

But as Gen. Mark Milley pointed out, the Afghanistan failure started back in 2001. Milley pointed to the failure to take out bin-Laden in 2001, the ill-advised invasion of Iraq which shifted troops that were needed in Afghanistan to root out both al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, and then after allowing them to find sanctuary in the mountains of western of Pakistan, where the government there allowed the local tribes (similar to Afghanistan) to have a degree of autonomy, and thus allowing the Taliban to regroup.

And that brings up the question of if sending those needed resources to Iraq was worth the cost. First off, the justifications for the invasion of Iraq were a lie; Al-Qaeda was as much a problem for the Saddam Hussein regime as it was for the U.S., and the Bush administration chose to ignore international weapons inspectors’ assertion that there were no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. These false justifications were nothing more than cover for restoring the “honor” of the elder Bush’s failure to use the massive forces from all over the world to take down the Saddam regime. But some observers thought even if the Saddam regime was overthrown from within, it wouldn’t have been replaced by a “better” government, and would no longer serve as a “bulwark” against Iranian mischief in the region.

Instead of seeing a stable “democracy” in Iraq, what we see is chaos, thanks in part to that old foe, Muqtada al-Sadr, who just won’t go away.  Although it didn’t get much “play” in the U.S. media, non-stop mass protests occurred in Iraq for two years leading up the 2021 parliamentary elections. Naturally, the inability of Sunni and Shiite factions to work together for common cause led to both declaring that “party-based” democratic governments doesn’t work in Muslim countries (big surprise—even in Turkey it is under threat), along with complaints of corruption, economic problems and inefficient public services.

After a government crackdown, an election was held late last year, where the Sadrist Movement (which draws its support from the poorer sections of the population) and headed by Sadr claimed it had enough support to take control of the government and make “changes” in the constitution. This was apparently seen as an effort to solidify his power, but also seen as a threat to parties backed by Iranian influence, since the megalomaniacal Sadr is a nationalist and sees Iraq as his domain and not as a puppet of Iran. With opposition to his “plan” in parliament, Sadr decided to recall the members of the Sadrist Movement, and they were replaced by Iranian-backed parties which became a majority in parliament, and that led to Sadr’s supporters invading the Green Zone and occupying the parliament building.

Yes, Iraq is complete mess, because once more the U.S. and the West don’t understand how religion and politics are intertwined, and should serve as warning about the “Christian Nationalism” supported by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene.