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After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States declared a global war on terrorism. The terrorist group Al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden were declared the number one enemy for the United States. In pursuit of terrorists, the United States launched an invasion of Afghanistan, which would become a 20-year war, the longest in U.S. history. The hasty, chaotic U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021 is now called a disgrace and humiliation not only for the United States, but also for the entire West. However, the consequences of the war for the Afghan people are far direr. People have been left to fend for themselves, face to face with poverty, devastation and terrorism.
The Belarusian news agency BelTA continues a series of materials on U.S. war crimes. We will narrate about the events of history that has not yet been rewritten. The Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the military intervention in Yugoslavia... People must remember what happened. And remember it for the sake of the future.
‘Enduring Freedom’ and ‘Resolute Support’. How was the U.S. restoring order in Afghanistan?
After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban extradite Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders who, according to U.S. intelligence, were hiding in Afghanistan. However, the Taliban refused. That became the reason for the invasion of Afghanistan.
On 7 October 2001, the United States, with the support of the United Kingdom, launched Operation Enduring Freedom. The operational group of the two countries, which directly took part in the hostilities, numbered 55,000 troops.
On the territory of Afghanistan, they were supported by the Northern Alliance (United Islamic National Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan). Australia and Canada became allies, and almost fifty countries provided air corridors, military airfields, mobile hospitals, etc.
It is worth noting that the operation was not authorized by the UN Security Council. Washington and London just notified the international organization of the outbreak of hostilities, designating the intervention in Afghanistan as an exercise of the right to self-defense.
In the first phase of the operation, the coalition launched missile and bomb strikes on major cities, including Kabul and Kandahar. Their targets were the Taliban's strategic facilities. U.S. ground forces landed in Afghanistan in November.
On 9 November, the major Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif was captured, followed by Kabul and Kunduz. Kandahar, which was considered a stronghold of the Taliban, fell on 7 December.
In two and a half months of fighting, the military of the United States and the UK managed to remove the Taliban from power and destroy their military capabilities. Some of the militants moved to the neighboring Pakistan. Some, including Taliban leader Mohammad Omar, escaped to the mountains. The rest surrendered.
However, Osama bin Laden remained at large. The U.S. military received information that the al-Qaeda leader was hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex. The battles for the fortified area lasted almost a week. After the capture of Tora Bora, it turned out that bin Laden had left the caves before the battle began.
In December 2001, the UN Security Council passed a resolution to set up the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). From 2001 to 2014, the ISAF included units from 50 NATO countries and alliance partners. The backbone of the coalition was made up of the U.S. military. In some years, the U.S. contingent accounted for up to 75% of the ISAF. In 2011, there were 101,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. In second place in terms of the number of contingents was the United Kingdom, followed by Germany and Italy.
The ISAF helped the new Afghan government to hold elections, operated Kabul International Airport, and assisted the Afghan authorities in building the army and reforming security institutions. However, some of the U.S. contingent was not part of the ISAF. The U.S. military had its own goals. They continued to search for Taliban and al-Qaeda militants. In May 2011, U.S. Special Forces killed bin Laden in Pakistan.
In 2013, the ISAF began to drawdown its troops in Afghanistan. In the summer of the same year, the international coalition transferred the control over the territory of the country to the army and security services of Afghanistan. The ISAF announced the end of its mission a year later.
"At the end of this year, we complete our combat mission in Afghanistan and open a new chapter in our relationship with Afghanistan. The security of Afghanistan will be fully in the hands of the country’s 350,000 Afghan soldiers and police... The ISAF has been the largest military coalition in recent history and represents an unprecedented international effort involving more than 50 countries. Our mandate was to help the Afghan authorities provide security across the country and develop new Afghan forces. This mandate was carried out at great cost, but with great success," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement.
However, the "success" of the international coalition was brief. With the withdrawal of the ISAF force, the Taliban became active again, which at that time numbered about 40,000 men in its ranks. The Islamic State operated in the region too. The level of terrorist threat in Afghanistan began to grow rapidly. In this regard, NATO countries decided to establish the alliance's Resolute Support Mission on 1 January 2015, which was expected to train the Afghan military and police officers. At the same time, NATO instructors were forbidden to participate in hostilities.
"We will also contribute to the financing of the Afghan security forces, and build an enduring partnership with Afghanistan which reflects our joint interests, shapes our joint cooperation and contributes to our shared security," Jens Stoltenberg said.
In turn, the then U.S. President Barack Obama said that America's commitment to the people of Afghanistan will endure. "Our personnel will continue to face risks, but this reflects the enduring commitment of the United States to the Afghan people and to a united, secure and sovereign Afghanistan that is never again used as a source of attacks against our nation," Barack Obama said.
‘America's reputation is crumbling before our eyes.’ How did the USA flee Afghanistan?
Despite NATO's assistance to the Afghan military, the Taliban's position in the country was rapidly strengthening. There are different opinions on this. Experts note that there was a huge gap between the corrupt pro-American government of Afghanistan and the people living in poverty.
The brutal methods employed by the U.S. and Afghan military, the so-called night raid tactics, seriously undermined the trust of the civilian population. "Our success in Afghanistan was measured in body bags," Thomas Johnson, a professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, told the BBC. At the same time, the Taliban methodically worked with the local population, promoting their ideas.
At the end of 2017, the Afghan government controlled only 57% of the country's territory. This situation forced the United States to change the strategy. Washington announced its plans to support negotiations between the Taliban and the current Afghan authorities. As a result, an agreement was signed in early 2020. It provided for the Taliban's renunciation of terrorist activities and the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021.
In the spring of 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that U.S. troops would leave Afghanistan by 11 September 2021. A similar decision was made by NATO. However, the Taliban warned that they would not tolerate a foreign military presence in Afghanistan after 31 August. The Taliban also demanded that the Americans complete the operation to evacuate civilians by 31 August.
As a result, the Western coalition withdrew from Afghanistan by the end of the summer. The last U.S. soldier left the Afghan territory on 31 August.
The withdrawal of the U.S. troops looked more like an escape. In early August, the Taliban stepped up their offensive against the Afghan government forces. On 15 August, they entered Kabul and the following day declared that the war was over. The Afghan National Army effectively surrendered the country without a fight, despite its numbers and superiority in weapons. The pro-American regime of Afghanistan, led by Ashraf Ghani, fell even before the withdrawal of foreign troops was completed. Ghani himself hastily fled the country. Thus, the order that the United States had been building in Afghanistan for two decades collapsed in an instant, like a house of cards.
Notably, Biden said back in July 2021 that “the Afghan government and leadership have to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.” Biden also noted that the withdrawal of the U.S. troops cannot be compared to how the situation developed at the end of the Vietnam War. “The Taliban is not the south—the North Vietnamese army. They're not—they're not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable," Biden said.
However, a month and a half later, the whole world could watch the chaos of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Evacuation helicopters landed right in the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy. Black smoke was rising above the diplomatic mission building - the Americans were burning documents and state symbols to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Taliban. The U.S. military abandoned weapons and military equipment as they did not get a chance to hand them over to Afghan security forces. As a result, these weapons were picked up by the militants.
Meanwhile, thousands of people who wanted to leave the country gathered at the Kabul airport. Many of them had been collaborating with the Americans for many years and were afraid that the Taliban would retaliate. People tried to get on board of American military aircraft, including cargo planes. Horrible footage showed desperate Afghans clinging to the fuselage of the U.S. aircraft and then falling from the height of 100-200m.
“America’s reputation around the world is crumbling in front of our eyes,” the U.S. television network Fox News reported.
The New York Times called what was happening in Afghanistan an unspeakable tragedy. “It has long been clear that the American withdrawal would leave the Taliban poised to seize control of Afghanistan once again. The war needed to end. But the Biden administration could and should have taken more care to protect those who risked everything in pursuit of a different future, however illusory those dreams proved to be,” the newspaper wrote.
The New York Times recalled how the Soviet army was leaving Afghanistan: “Red flags attached to armored vehicles fluttered in the winter wind as departing Soviet troops crossed the bridge on 15 February 1989. It was a symbol of the orderly and dignified departure of the superpower’s army.”
In early September, members of Afghanistan’s interim government were announced. Mohammad Hassan became acting prime minister. Thus, the 20-year war in Afghanistan was not only the longest in American history, it was also a complete failure. In fact, the Americans gave way to those with whom they came to fight.
Disregarding the ICC. What does international law turn a blind eye to?
The United States invaded Afghanistan with a declared goal of fighting terrorism. However, those who bore the brunt of the American invasion were civilians. The American and NATO military regularly carried out indiscriminate airstrikes on populated areas, threw people into jail without trial, tortured prisoners. A number of independent non-governmental organizations published reports containing evidence of U.S. war crimes, demanding that those responsible be brought to justice.
Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague tried to launch an investigation against the United States. According to the ICC report, U.S. military personnel may have been involved in the ill-treatment and torture of at least 61 detainees during operations in Afghanistan from 1 May 2003 to 31 December 2014.
The ICC also suspected CIA operatives of abusing 27 detainees from Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania from December 2002 to March 2008 in CIA’s secret prisons. Prisoners were subjected to the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” that included torture, sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, rape, mock execution, etc. In Afghanistan, this was taking place at a prison at the U.S. military base Bagram. Many Afghans suspected of terrorism by U.S. intelligence agencies were later transferred to Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, where they spent many years without trial.
"War crimes and other abuses have been documented by U.S. military personnel at CIA’s secret detention sites in Afghanistan. This occurred primarily between 2003 and 2004, although abuses reportedly continued into 2014," the report of the International Criminal Court read.
According to ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, the cases listed in the report were not isolated episodes, but part of an approved interrogation technique.
It is worth noting that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were developed jointly with psychologist James Mitchell who collaborated with the CIA. During a 2020 hearing at the Guantanamo Bay base, he revealed details of how he tortured prisoners. Mitchell admitted to depriving detainees of sleep for days, waterboarding, walling, and threatening to kill their children.
Washington rebuffed the ICC findings and sanctioned several ICC officials in 2020. The then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed the ICC as an irresponsible, corrupt and politicized body in disguise of an institution of law. However, a year later, the Biden administration lifted the sanctions. Yet, the ICC got the warning and wound down the investigation.
Nevertheless, U.S. war crimes continued to be reported by human rights organizations and mass media. In October 2019, Human Rights Watch published a report accusing CIA-backed Afghan strike forces of engaging in extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, attacks on medical facilities and other violations of the international humanitarian law and laws of war.
A Human Rights Watch report documented cases in which CIA-backed Afghan strike forces committed war crimes between late 2017 and mid-2019. “Afghan officials, civil society and human rights activists, Afghan and foreign healthcare workers, journalists and community elders all described abusive raids and indiscriminate airstrikes as having become a daily fact of life for many communities... One diplomat familiar with Afghan strike force operations referred to them as ‘death squads’,” noted Human Rights Watch.
Human rights activists drew attention to the fact that the Afghan paramilitary forces involved in war crimes only nominally belonged to the Afghan National Directorate of Security. In reality, they did not fall under the ordinary chain of command within the NDS. “They largely have been recruited, trained, equipped, and overseen by the CIA,” Human Rights Watch reported.
There were attempts in Kabul and Washington to challenge the report's findings. The CIA called military operations in Afghanistan consistent with international law.
A year before the Human Rights Watch report was published, the New York Times put out the findings of its own investigation into the actions of the CIA-backed Afghan forces. The publication concluded that the Afghan military did not follow the rules for the protection of civilians and could commit war crimes.
The UN report dated 24 April 2019 arrived at similar conclusions. “From 1 January to 31 March 2019, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) documented 1,773 civilian casualties (581 deaths and 1,192 injured), including 582 child casualties (150 deaths and 432 injured),” the report said. It was noted that the number of civilian casualties as a result of military operations by pro-government forces continued to grow.
In November 2019, the UK government and armed forces were accused of covering up the killing of civilians by British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. An investigation by BBC Panorama and The Sunday Times had spoken to 11 British detectives who said they found credible evidence of war crimes.
Since the beginning of the military operation in Afghanistan in October 2001, there have been numerous reports of U.S. air strikes killing civilians. The American military bombed residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. According to TASS estimates, from 2001 to 2015 there were about two dozen such cases. Here are just a few of them.
On 17 October 2001, at least 29 civilians were killed when the U.S. Air Force bombed a village near Kandahar. According to the Japanese agency Kyodo, American aircraft attacked a passenger bus. On the same day, according to the Ministry of Information of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (this was the name of the country when the Taliban was in power), in the suburbs of Kandahar, an American aircraft destroyed a truck carrying people who were fleeing the bombings. As a result of the second strike, 12 people were killed and about 25 were injured.
On 21 December 2001, 65 people died near the city of Khost when a Lockheed AC-130 gunship and U.S. carrier-based fighters mistakenly destroyed a convoy of 12 vehicles in which tribal leaders from eastern Afghanistan were heading to Kabul for the swearing-in ceremony of the country’s interim government.
On 1 July 2002, at least 40 people were killed and over 70 injured in the U.S. air raid during a wedding in the village of Kakarak, Uruzgan Province.
On 22 August 2008, the air strikes by the international coalition forces killed from 78 to 92 civilians in the village of Azizabad. The target of the air raid was a Taliban field commander. In October 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense admitted killing 33 civilians in the air strike.
On 4 May 2009, U.S. air strikes killed from 86 to 147 civilians in the village of Granai, Bala Boluk District of Afghanistan's western Farah Province. The air strike hit the house where women, children and elderly people had found refuge from the fighting (the NATO-backed Afghan army was fighting the Taliban in the vicinity of the village).
On 4 September 2009, a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet, part of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, struck two fuel tankers captured by Taliban insurgents a day before. The Taliban opened the tankers up to locals to siphon fuel. The attack killed up to 179 people, more than 100 of them were civilians.
On 3 October 2015, a U.S. Air force gunship attacked the Kunduz Trauma Center operated by the international organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) in northern Afghanistan. 42 people, including 12 employees of the organization, were killed and about 40 others were injured. According to the U.S. account, the strike was “a mistake”. The MSF organization doubted the accidental nature of the incident. Christopher Stokes, General Director of Médecins Sans Frontières Belgium, said at the time that the organization “proceeds from a clear presumption that a war crime was committed”. In this regard, Stokes demanded that a full and transparent investigation into the incident be conducted by an independent international body. He added that “relying only on an internal investigation by a party to the conflict would be wholly insufficient”.
In 2021 Christopher Stokes said that the Taliban never violated the humanitarian agreements reached with the Doctors Without Borders in 2015 and continued to honor them after taking power. “After our hospital in Kunduz was destroyed by the U.S. Armed Forces, we reached a number of agreements to prevent such things from happening in the future. This resulted in a series of humanitarian documents and principles that were signed by the Taliban, the USA and the Afghan government to protect our hospitals, ambulances and staff,” he said.
According to Christopher Stokes, those agreements continue to be in place and are still respected by the Taliban. “We have had no attacks on MSF from the Taliban,” he added. The MSF representative noted that “the dialogue with the Taliban has been constructive, and remains so to this day”.
The USA has tried to cover up its war crimes in every possible way. For example, in 2010 seven civilians, including two pregnant women, were killed by the U.S. military. According to eyewitnesses, the U.S. military pulled bullets out of the dead bodies in order to hide the traces of the crime. At first, the Pentagon denied the guilt of its servicemen, but later admitted that the women were killed during the raid. None of those guilty were ever brought to justice.
Bitter lessons of war. What kind of world did the USA build in Afghanistan?
In 2004, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO secretary general, said that Afghanistan was a priority for the alliance and pledged support to the country in every possible way. “The number one priority on our agenda is Afghanistan. NATO will continue its assistance to ensure political stability there in the future,” he said.
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer was succeeded as NATO secretary general by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who also assured the Afghans of eternal support. "The Alliance will not leave the current Afghan leadership alone with the Taliban. Kabul will remain a strategic partner for NATO in the fight against international terrorism,” Rasmussen declared in 2010.
Four years later, Jens Stoltenberg became NATO secretary general. He continued to make empty promises: “The future of Afghanistan will be in Afghan hands. But our support will continue,” Jens Stoltenberg said during a visit to Kabul in 2014.
Here is his statement made on 14 June 2021, a month and a half before the USA withdrew its forces from Afghanistan: “NATO is not ending its support for Afghanistan. We will continue to provide training to the Afghan security forces and we will continue to maintain Afghanistan's transport infrastructure, in particular airports.”
How the story of the U.S.-NATO partnership with Afghanistan ended is a well-known fact. So is the fact that Washington is not used to admitting mistakes and showing remorse. Therefore, one should not be surprised by the words of U.S. President Joe Biden who said that “the history is going to record this was the logical, rational, and right decision to make”. According to the U.S. president, Washington has accomplished its objectives, including delivering a ‘crushing blow’ to the al-Qaeda terrorist group. In September 2022, Biden signed an executive order that excluded Afghanistan from Washington's major allies outside NATO.
As many as 2,400 U.S. service members and more than 1,000 military personnel from other coalition countries were killed over the years of the war in Afghanistan. More than 20,000 U.S. soldiers were wounded.
According to the data released by Brown University in 2019, Afghanistan's national armed forces and police have lost more than 64,000 officers during the war. However, civilian casualties remain to be the highest. According to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, nearly 111,000 Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded since the UN began counting civilian casualties in 2009. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have become refugees.
The arrival of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan only strengthened the country's status as a hotbed of terrorism and a center of drug production and distribution. Over two decades of so-called Western assistance, Afghanistan has never recovered from its economic and political crises. This does not mean that the USA has not invested money in the “Afghan project”. According to Brown University, the USA spent $2 trillion on the war. However, these funds were not spent for the benefit of the country. They ended up in the pockets of corrupt pro-American officials. As a result, the country became completely dependent on external funding and lost the opportunity for independent development.
The people of Afghanistan were left alone with devastation, hunger, poverty and terrorism. Today, the country is the epicenter of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Some 30 million people need help. More than 3 million Afghan children and 840,000 pregnant and lactating mothers are suffering from malnutrition. Desperate Afghans agree to sell their organs, and some families sell their children to find means to feed the rest of the family.
“The crisis in Afghanistan is a humanitarian crisis. It is an economic crisis. It is a climate crisis. It is a hunger crisis. It is a financial crisis. But it is not a hopeless crisis,” UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths said addressing the Security Council in August 2022. He noted that solving Afghanistan's problems requires international support and funding.
However, even less funds were allocated to Afghanistan in 2023. In September, the UN food agency cut life-saving aid to 2 million people in Afghanistan due to funding shortfalls. “Amid already worrying levels of hunger and malnutrition, we are obliged to choose between the hungry and the starving, leaving millions of families scrambling for their next meal. With the few resources we have left, we are not able to serve all those people teetering on the edge of utter destitution,” WFP Country Director for Afghanistan Hsiao-Wei Lee said.
With winter approaching, she said, 90% of the population in remote areas of Afghanistan could end up in a “catastrophic situation”.
The U.S. decision to block the assets of the Central Bank of Afghanistan held in the USA looks particularly cynical against this backdrop. The assets make up $7 billion. The World Food Program requested only $1 billion to help Afghans in 2023. How did Washington dispose of the Afghan money? The USA planned to allocate half of these funds to compensate the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and to give the other half to humanitarian organizations. The White House recognizes that the people of Afghanistan need financial assistance, but is not ready to give money to the Taliban.
From the White House's point of view, the USA did everything it could to help Afghanistan cope with terrorism and take a new path of development. The current situation in the country is entirely the fault of the Afghan military and the new authorities. Washington prefers not to talk about the fact that for two decades the corrupt pro-American governments of Afghanistan cashed in while ordinary people lived in poverty.
The Afghan war became a failure for the USA. The Americans however have already turned this page over, as they did with Vietnam, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, and try not to remember it. Those who believed that the USA would come to another country to create a wonderful new world there were bitterly disillusioned. But for Afghans, it is a terrible, painful tragedy, the consequences of which they have to live with every day.
According to Biden, the decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries. But it would be naive to assume that the USA will abandon its plans to “remake” other nations. It is conceivable that Washington will change tactics, using proxy forces in its wars rather than the U.S. military, as it is doing in Ukraine today. But this will not make the fate of the countries in the claws of Washington's hawks any easier.
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