Its been a year since the US left Afghanistan. On the anniversary of that very event Western media outlets eagerly describe how the country is rapidly descending into chaos and how now Afghanistan is on the verge of turning into the biggest humanitarian crisis of 2022. Hospitals run out of medication and the country slowly descends into chaos.
The Western journalists reporting from Kabul fleetingly mention how the US government confiscated (read stole) the Afghan bank reserves, how the sanctions are having an impact and how foreign aid was blocked from carrying out its work in the country. These factors are mentioned without really studying their egregious consequences. Rather one is lead into the opposite direction: the blame naturally is focused on the Taliban, hence Western superiority is assured. That the whole country became reliant on foreign aid in the first place of course was of western design that was only to pleased to create a dependency. Now the triumphant Westerner may point once more to the backward Asian who should have known they were incapable without Western governance.
Naturally the above-mentioned punishments were justified in the western press on grounds of “rights”, above all the right of young girls to go to school. An image was injected into the western conscience, as if the whole country until the moment of the US withdrawal had been a bastion of freedom and democracy. In truth the Western puppet regime in Kabul never controlled much more than Kabul. Hence this vision that across the country the whole population of young women was suddenly falling under the oppressive tentacles of the Taliban was made to seem very real, when in fact little outside of the capital little had changed at all.
For the unassuming Westerner that is bombarded twenty four hours a day with what is termed “wokeism”, it must be tricky to extrapolate yourself from the glaringly obvious contradiction in the narrative. Then anyone even capable of one iota of critical thinking could not have missed the blatant hypocrisy in the rights justification i.e. its terrible for girls not to go to school, therefore we will make sure they are all deprived of medications and we will allow them to starve. Amazingly we will ensure the collapse of your nation and your people with an air of superiority and a sense of “I told you so” rather than shame at the destructive policies the US government pursued.
It’s incredible that the Western “liberal” is even able to conceive of himself as the purveyor and guarantor of women’s rights in the third world, then the reality is a stark contradiction of these self-styled Western illusions. No one has done more to harm the female emancipation movements in Asia or Africa than the USA. Afghanistan itself is a prime example. Afghanistan was a renowned destination in the 60’s and 70’s as part of the hippie trail. It was free and welcoming, an open society in a naturalistic sense, as opposed to the Popperian notion; certainly the women were not forced to cover themselves from head to toe. Rather the authoritarian bent in this and other nations took place as geopolitics entered the fray. Here we see how it was the US cold war strategy to support often extreme nationalist-conservative or ethnocentric ideologies as a part of their cold war strategy against Communism. In 1980s Afghanistan this was the Mujahedeen that fought to evict the Communists from the land. Ironically the Mujahedeen along with the weapons and finance received from both the US and Saudi Arabia would help foment an Islamic turn in the country from which the Taliban would ultimately ascend to power.
While the feminist cause was often portrayed in the West as being interwoven with global communist movements, this in itself is far removed from the truth. Then the main African-Asian feminist movements such as the 1958 First Asian-African Conference on Women held in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo or the Cairo Women’s conference in 61 were associated with the Bandung non-aligned movement, a movement that sought above all to remove the Western shackles of their imperial and colonial overloads. However, these concepts alone appeared threatening to what the US saw as its geopolitical interests. As such all across the globe the US would support any movement that would explicitly reject the central tenets of these worldwide movements and in the process they would throw back the feminist cause by decades.
For keen observers of international affairs these US double standards have become crystal clear. Today Afghanistan is simple another case in a long list of examples. At this juncture we wish to affirm that any western claim to justify sanctions on the grounds of rights is mere obfuscation. Central here is to remember that article 2 of the Geneva convention on Human rights is the right to live. Right now the US is apparently doing everything to undermine this right. The question is why? There are at least two potential reasons: one the US seeks Afghan subservience and hopes the Afghan people will demand their return; two, it’s an opportunity to cause political instability on both the confines of the Chinese, Iranian and Russian borderlands.
EAST AND WEST 