Bitter Inheritance

by Guillermo Alvarado

 In 2001, the United States led an international coalition to bomb and occupy Afghanistan, under the pretext that this country had given asylum to Osama Bin Laden, the alleged perpetrator of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, a fact about which there are still many ambiguities.

The operation was given the absurd name of "Enduring Freedom" and was supposed to bring Western "values" of democracy and development to the Central Asian nation, although the concrete result was to practically return the country to the Middle Ages.

The war to remove the Taliban from power and establish a new political system lasted twenty years, and after a chaotic departure of the occupation forces, it was the Taliban who remained in power and were to be eradicated.

In the meantime, the country was brutally devastated, and while there were casualties on both sides, the civilian population bore the brunt.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, which cannot be accused of being anti-American, 852 civilians were killed each year between 2007 and 2016, rising to 1,100 between 2017 and 2019, and since 2016, 40% of the victims of airstrikes have been children.

As a result of the conflict, millions of people live in poverty and suffer from hunger and disease, the economy has collapsed due to the illegal retention of financial reserves abroad, and human rights abuses are widespread.

Nearly 24 million people live in Afghanistan, and another 7.3 million are refugees in five neighboring countries, where they urgently need humanitarian assistance.

Today, in the country to which the Western powers went to bring their democracy and values, there are 2.5 million girls and adolescents who cannot attend school because of the rules of the Taliban government, denounced the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. According to this UN mechanism, the university population has decreased by 54% since 2021, which will lead to a shortage of professionals and further aggravate development problems.

There is no doubt that Afghanistan is one of the most shameful episodes for the United States, which also shows a brutal inability to learn the lessons of history: defeated in Vietnam and Afghanistan, it is now embarking on new misadventures in Ukraine and the Middle East, with no regard for the enormous human cost of each military operation in which it interferes.