It was Obama’s idea to get out of Afghanistan as far back as 2010, even without a victory. He did not like the idea of fighting to protect corrupt politicians who did not have the guts to fight their own civil war. Bob Woodward wrote in Obama’s War that the policy should have been to construct a Jeffersonian style democracy (as if Jefferson who enslaved hundreds of Africans and raped enslaved children to make more babies for sale was such a good role model for democracy). Obama insisted that it was up to the Afghans what sort of polity that they wanted to build, so long as they did not harbor terrorists or threaten human rights. If they choose to build a more perfect union, the US will be there to assist them and if they allow any group to threaten the US from their soil, the can count on being punished again, collateral damages and all.
US generals told Obama to follow their recommendation to remain because they were the ones on the ground. Obama told them that he was the Commander In Chief and that he was giving them the direct order to find an exit strategy. Although he agreed to their recommendation for more resources by sending 30,000 more troops in the surge of 2009 to bring the troop levels to nearly 100,000, he made it clear that it was a temporary measure to accomplish the goal getting Osama and getting out. He got his man in 2011 and immediately started rapid draw down of troops from about 100,000 to about 28,000 when he handed over to Trump.
Trump came in and said that it was a mistake to leave quickly. He wanted to stay on and ‘kill terrorists’. But he ended up negotiating with the Taliban for a time-table to withdraw US troops within a year after his term in office. Biden delayed Trump’s arbitrary deadline by 3 months to see if the Afghans would come to a negotiated settlement on their own but their corrupt government bragged that they preferred to fight on.
Biden is mistaken in suggesting that getting out of there was the Trump policy. It was the policy set by the Obama-Biden administration. It was bungled by Trump who may have demoralized Afghan troops by negotiating with the Taliban without inviting Afghan government officials. Some Afghan troops were sympathetic to the Taliban and were shooting US troops in the back, so it was no surprise when they refused to fight the Taliban and handed over their weapons.
It is to the credit of the US society that thousands of Afghans were scrambling into military cargo planes crammed like slave ships to escape their own country. It is true that hundreds of thousands more will prefer to move to the US than live under the Taliban or the impoverished society left by the US. Afghans can help to change that Stockholm syndrome by guaranteeing the rights of women and children to go to school.
Obama already increased school enrollment for girls and brought women into the traditional ruling councils called Jirgas (reported by Wardak and Braithwaite in a two-part article in the British Journal of Criminology in 2013). Afghans should consider having a co-equal bicameral legislature with a House of Men and a House of Women and they should enforce gender parity in all offices provided that there is mass literacy. Abolish capital punishment too also in the US that retains what David Garland called the peculiar institution of a barbaric practice in one of the most advanced societies today (Garland attributed this to Jeffersonian democracy that allows home rule to local communities but how about Federal death penalty?).
After 20 years of conquest and occupation, the average years of schooling remained 3.9 years, according to the Human Development Index and that is the shame of US occupation. Bigger shame to African countries that have also neglected the education of African children and therefore hug the bottom of the HDI ranking annually; they are ranked even below Afghanistan.
If 26% of the trillions of dollars spent in Afghanistan had gone to education, as recommended by UNESCO for all countries, the country would have 100% literacy today. If all that money was spent at home on education, all the student loan debts of US students would have been paid off with some change left to help provide publicly funded education at all levels and healthcare for all. The Biden-Harris administration should pursue bold policy initiatives with the savings from wars of choice that should be rightfully ended and with the huge infrastructures budget.
It was reported that the Taliban made much of their war revenues through the drugs trade. They should now join states in the US by legalizing marijuana because it is known to be medicinal and therefore should not be forbidden as Haram. Legalization of marijuana will bring in wealth and employment opportunities for many families as they recover from the war and the government can tax their profits. At the same time, the people should learn from even the Taliban that alcoholism is harmful but use education rather than prohibition to control it.
Biden-Harris should lead the world by example from home by ending the war on drugs so that educators and healthcare providers can use harm-reduction instead of punishment to deal with the public health issues of drug use. End the war against the people in the guise of the war on drugs worldwide, says the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. End pyrrhic defeat.
•Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA. He is the author of the following books – Critical, Creative and Centered Scholar-Activism: The Fourth Dimensionalism of Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo (2016, FDP); ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine, 2006; Counter-Colonial Criminology, 2003; Pan African Issues in Crime and Justice (co-edited), 2004; Nigeria: Democratising a Militarised Civil Society, (co-authored) 2001; Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Migration Research (edited), 2000; and Black Women and the Criminal Justice System, 1997.
