On August 30, 2021, the United States hastily completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee this year issued a report titled "A Brief Assessment of the Strategic Mistakes Made by the Biden Administration in The Withdrawal from Afghanistan," in which the words "failure," "disregard," "abandonment," and "betrayal" are repeatedly used. To date, the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan has not been fully alleviated, with 18.9 million Afghans still facing fatal food shortages, including 1.1 million children; The United Nations estimates that 97% of Afghans will live in poverty by mid-2022, while the United States will also seize $7 billion in Afghan assets...
"The war is not over"
△ The title of the August 12 article of Time emphasizes that the US war in Afghanistan is a "betrayal" and the withdrawal is a "disaster".
"The war is not over," is what American veterans writer Elliot Ackerman repeatedly emphasizes in his new book, Act Five. In an interview with Time magazine, Ackman said the evacuation a year ago was just a "separate peace" for themselves by the Americans themselves. Ackerman asked that the U.S. military, as an outsider, could choose to go away, but what choice did the Afghans who guarded their shattered homes have?
A timeline tucked out of the U.S. Congressional Research Office documents also confirms that the U.S. invasion brought about a 20-year war in Afghanistan, and that the United States did not seek peace for Afghanistan during the withdrawal process.
2001
The United States occupied Afghanistan, and some Afghan Taliban personnel were willing to lay down their arms and negotiate peace, but the United States refused.
2010
The United States, which has been mired in the war for nearly a decade, has sought a compromise with the Afghan Taliban, but it has been rejected.
2018
Frustrated by the war, then-President Trump ordered the U.S.-backed Afghan government to skip and directly begin withdrawal negotiations with the Afghan Taliban.
2019
Trump has publicly declared that he wants to withdraw troops "as soon as possible."
2020
The United States and the Afghan Taliban reached an agreement to withdraw all troops, contractors and non-military personnel except diplomats. The withdrawal talks do not include peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
2021.8
The Afghan Taliban controlled Kabul, and U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan, ending the so-called 20-year war, leaving behind a devastated country and warring forces on all sides that did not reach a peace deal.
After the farce of the Withdrawal of the United States, which only wants to get out of itself, and does not talk about the peaceful withdrawal of Afghanistan, it can only be an endless tragedy.
False promises
On August 30, 2021, the United States announced the end of its withdrawal from Afghanistan. U.S. President Joe Biden spoke at the White House the next day about the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, pledging to continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, international influence and humanitarian assistance. The reality, however, is that in the year that followed, the ongoing "humanitarian crisis" could not be ignored when mentioning the current situation in Afghanistan, from the UN Secretary-General to the media of various officials. According to the United Nations, 18.9 million people in Afghanistan are currently facing severe food shortages that could be fatal, and 1.1 million of them are at risk of starvation.
The United States cannot ignore the tragic situation in Afghanistan, so the American joke of "thieves shouting to catch thieves" has emerged one after another. A June report by the U.S. Research Office is a "classic": the previous sentence also claimed that the rise to power of the Afghan Taliban exacerbated the humanitarian crisis, and the next sentence listed the causes of the crisis, but all the reasons for the crisis were caused by the United States - the interruption of international aid, the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies, and the seizure of the assets of the Central Bank of Afghanistan.
A year later, the US media "National Review" "dug a grave for public" biden's speech, criticizing Biden for forgetting Afghanistan after he finished speaking, and his commitment "has nothing to do with the actual policy of the United States."
America's commitment to its own people is equally superficial. The United States spent more than $2 trillion in the war in Afghanistan, and a total of about 800,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Afghanistan, of which 2,461 were killed and 20,744 wounded. Biden said to "never, ever, never forget" them and their families, but the situation for American veteran families in 2022 is still the same tragic as it was a year ago and 21 years ago.
On August 26, 2021, a suicide attack at Kabul airport killed 13 U.S. troops, including 20-year-old Karim Nikuy. On August 9, 2022, at a commemoration of his anniversary, Nikuy's 28-year-old brother Dakota committed suicide on the spot. The mother, who has lost her beloved son twice, can only try to get through the crisis by collecting donations. Florida Rep. Mike Waltz called on social media that "someone must be held accountable for this ongoing massacre." ”
According to the latest data provided by the AMERICAN non-profit organization "Stop Veterans from Suicide", more than 114,000 American veterans have committed suicide since 2001; by 2030, the number of veteranS troops who have committed suicide will be 23 times higher than the number of US military deaths since 9/11, and the economic damage to American society will exceed 2 trillion US dollars. An average of 18 veterans commit suicide on U.S. soil every day.
More than 30 percent of U.S. veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more than one in ten veterans have been diagnosed with substance abuse problems. Nearly 40,000 veterans live on the streets, accounting for more than 9 percent of the nation's homeless. Even after leaving the army, even returning to the homeland, for them, the nightmare of war never ended.
The contrast between the current situation of veterans struggling on the fringes of American society and the president's promise to "never forget" is ironic. The veterans' self-help group made it clear in its self-introduction: "The official system does not work." No longer believing in Official American Promises and the Bureaucracy, they chose to huddle together to save themselves. Politicians can declare the end of a war in one sentence, but those who have been involved in it are likely to struggle for the rest of their lives.
The only promise Biden made in his withdrawal from Afghanistan has been fulfilled — to continue air strikes against Afghanistan when the United States needs to. On August 1, Biden announced that the United States had successfully carried out a drone operation against an "al-Qaida target" in Kabul, Afghanistan, and killed al-Qaida leader Ayman Zawahiri.
In response to this violation of sovereignty, anti-American demonstrations were held in many places in Afghanistan on August 5, and people held aloft banners with the words "Do not interfere in the internal affairs of Afghanistan" to protest the United States' violation of international norms.
Afghan children killed by U.S. air strikes
The Afghan people abhor the U.S. airstrikes because they remember that a year earlier, when the U.S. forces had retreated, they had also launched airstrikes that killed a family of ten civilians in Kabul. Afterwards, the U.S. government admitted to manslaughter, but did not punish anyone, but only promised to compensate and resettle the victim's family, and a year later, even the promise of compensation was not fulfilled.
The Selective Counterterrorism and Indiscriminate Killing of Innocents by the United States to achieve its geopolitical goals has led to the number of terrorist organizations in Afghanistan increasing from single digits to more than 20 in 20 years. Terrorist attacks by extremist groups such as the Islamic State are frequent. In Kabul alone, on average, there is one bombing attack in two to three days. The frequent terrorist attacks have not only caused the Afghan people to suffer, but also endanger the security of other countries, including the United States.
"The hand is too long and it is regurgitated"
The US authorities have done the opposite, and have been subjected to continuous criticism in the United States, from the temple to the people. At a hearing in September 2021, numerous members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee accused the Biden administration's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan of losing credibility to the United States and plunging Afghanistan into chaos and creating a humanitarian crisis. This year, the commission issued a report titled "A Brief Assessment of the Strategic Mistakes Made by the Biden Administration in The Withdrawal from Afghanistan," in which the words "failure," "disregard," "abandonment," and "betrayal" are repeatedly used.
On the first anniversary of the evacuation, according to Fox News, lawmakers from both the Democratic and Republican parties who held a critical stance even abandoned stereotypes and jointly voiced their dissatisfaction with the hasty withdrawal of the United States.
CNN also satirized on Aug. 12 that Biden "called the evacuation a huge success, like an arsonist boasting about trying to extinguish a fire he had caused." ”
Veteran U.S. Army Sergeant David Gedman, who served in Afghanistan, told his hometown fathers and countrymen on August 10 through local Ohio television: "The biggest lesson the U.S. government has learned is that we stretched our hands too far and were eaten back." ”
Changes in public opinion data are more intuitive. Poll data provided by Morning Consult shows that the chaotic and irresponsible evacuation farce in the United States has caused a large number of Americans who originally supported the withdrawal to change their minds, and the approval rate for the withdrawal operation has hit a new low again after a year. So many Americans have changed their attitudes, not because they support the war, but because they are disappointed in the government's ability to deal with it.
Biden's approval rating has also been on the decline since the evacuation tragedy, hitting new lows, falling from 59% in July 2021 to 36% in July 2022.
"I blame the Americans"
Despite the difficulties in rebuilding Afghanistan, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order on February 11 to spend half of the bank's frozen assets in the United States on compensation for victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This decision has been strongly opposed by the international community since its inception.
On August 10, 71 prominent economists and other scholars sent a joint letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding that the United States return $7 billion of frozen assets to the Central Bank of Afghanistan. These co-scholars include Giannis Valofakis, former Greek Finance Minister, and Joseph Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics and a professor at Columbia University in the United States.
△ Nobel Laureate Stiglitz infographic
The experts said in a joint letter that the United States could not justify the freezing of assets of the Central Bank of Afghanistan. Experts stressed that the economic catastrophe in Afghanistan is worsening and the humanitarian catastrophe persists, while U.S. policies are fueling these disasters and adding fuel to the fire.
Over the past year, the Afghan Interim Administration has also repeatedly called on the United States to unseal property that already belongs to Afghanistan. Once the assets are unfrozen and returned to Afghanistan, the central bank has the ability to use the funds to restore the economy and stabilize financial markets, officials said.
Pro-American government figures backed by the United States during the war in Afghanistan have also publicly expressed their anger and disappointment with the United States. Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai also recently spoke out against the United States for embezzling Afghanistan's wealth: "The US government's practice of seizing $7 billion of Afghan assets is wrong and unacceptable to the Afghan people. ”
A year ago at Kabul airport, A U.S. military plane hung on to an Afghan trying to board the plane and forcibly took off
Karzai added: "Recall the scene at the Kabul airport a year ago, where the chaos created by the Americans also led to the collapse of Afghanistan. This is something that makes Afghans very angry. ”
Afghan civilian Mohammed Rezai lost two sons during the withdrawal of U.S. troops. He told Western reporters: "I blame the Americans. A year ago, Two of Rezai's sons, 17-year-old Zabi and 19-year-old Zaki, tried to grab the plane and leave, and when the father ran 4.2 kilometers to chase him to the airport, he saw only Zabi's shattered body. The old father traveled all over Kabul's hospitals and prisons, and there was no news of Zaki everywhere. "One of my sons fell off a plane at Kabul airport and fell to his death, and I still don't know if the other son is dead or alive."
The forced take-off of the US aircraft caused at least 5 deaths, and the exact number of deaths is unknown because some of the wreckage is difficult to identify. In the past 20 years, more than 46,000 civilians in Afghanistan have died in the war caused by the US military, behind the cold data, how many desperate families?
It has become an international consensus that the United States lifted a stone and dropped itself on its own feet, and this time even CNN admitted that the war in Afghanistan was "one of the most phenomenal oolong balls played by the United States."
CNN also received news that the US House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee is about to issue a report on the first anniversary to "severely criticize" the withdrawal organized by Biden. The report will allegedly disclose much of the hidden evidence as a testament to the "failure of the Biden administration." A spokesman for the National Security Council called the report "riddled with inaccurate descriptions, carefully selected information and false statements." The division of U.S. domestic politics caused by the war in Afghanistan is evident. Not only the people of the two countries who were caught up in the war, but even the politicians who manipulated the war are still mired in the quagmire a year after the evacuation.
Producer 丨 Tang Yi
Producer 丨 Zhao Xinyu
Editor-in-chief 丨 Cui Chong
Edited by 丨 Wu Xiaolang
Source: CCTV News Client