Is The US Responsible For The Unfolding Human Rights Crisis In Afghanistan?

I woke up to the noise of our television in the morning. Our PM was delivering the Independence day speech. Every news channel was displaying how everyone was talking about democracy freedom liberty and what not.

I never liked speeches; I find them immensely boring, therefore, I went to my laptop and started scrolling news online. The news trending there was about the Taliban taking control of Afghanistan. It was extremely disturbing for me that while our country was celebrating 75 years of its independence, one of our neighboring nations was being run down by an extremist group (Taliban).

Strategic Errors

During the ‘Cold War’, seeing the influence of the USSR in Afghanistan, the US started funding the “Mujahideen”, an opposite ideological group in Afghanistan just to settle the scores with the USSR. To do this, the CIA conducted its secret operation named ‘Operation Cyclone’.

After all this support and funding from the US, the “Mujahideen” started growing in Afghanistan. In 1988, the President of Afghanistan signed an accord called ‘Geneva Accords’. The guarantors of this accord were the US and the USSR. As per the agreement, the US pledged that if USSR removed its troops from Afghanistan then they would also stop supplying weapons to the “Mujahideen”.

In 1989, USSR removed its troops from Afghanistan and the government of Afghanistan started trying to bring peace to the country by introducing new reforms. Even after all of this, the US didn’t stop providing weapons to “Mujahideen” which led to the group boycotting the election of Afghanistan and starting a civil war in 1989.

In 1992, the group won this civil war and Burhanuddin Rabbani became the leader of the Islamic State of Afghanistan. With funding and provision of weapons, the US purged all the efforts of Afghanistan to bring democracy to the country, and after a couple of years, a new group started growing which is known as the Taliban.

In 1996, the Taliban removed the leader of the Islamic State of Afghanistan. This group was formed by the Mullah Omar along with fifty students. Within months, 15000 fighters, who were Afghan refugees from religious schools or madrasas in Pakistan joined the group.

These people were religious extremists. In 2001, a terrorist group Al-Qaeda under the leadership of Osama bin laden conducted a terrorist attack on America which is known as the attack of 9/11.

The Taliban after the attacks, sheltered Osama Bin Laden and as a result to take revenge, US conducted airstrikes on Afghanistan and deployed its forces in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

For the next 20 years, the US maintained a constant presence in Afghanistan till 2020 when the US government under the leadership of Mr. Donald Trump started peace talks with the Taliban, and by August, 2021, the US had removed its troops from Afghanistan leaving Afghanistan on its own.

Was The US Right?

If revenge was the only motive of the United States, then it should have removed its troops from Afghanistan in 2011 when they killed Osama Bin Laden but if the motive was “to build a stable, strong, effectively governed Afghanistan that won’t degenerate into chaos” as stated by President Bush, then America has failed.

The current President of the US supported the removal of troops from Afghanistan by saying that he does not trust the Taliban and that 300,000 of the ANDSF can easily counter 85,000 Taliban fighters.

However, as we can all see the ground reality is totally different within the last couple of days Taliban have captured almost the entire territory of Afghanistan. The videos and pictures that are going viral on social media are immensely disturbing.

Amidst the chaos, the US is only concerned about American citizens who are trapped in Afghanistan but what about the Afghan people who are trapped there? According to me, this is the murder of democracy.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons/for representational purposes only.