The earthquake in Afghanistan exposes a disaster caused by decades of American occupation

A 6.1-magnitude earthquake in a remote region of Afghanistan killed 1,000 people and injured at least 1,500. While the most affected area is the mountainous Paktika province, deaths have also been reported in the eastern provinces of Khost and Nangarhar. It is believed that many of the bodies were buried in the mud as heavy rains hampered rescue efforts.

The quake was the deadliest since 2002, when a 6.1-magnitude quake killed nearly 1,000 people in the north of the country. It struck early Wednesday morning, 30 miles southwest of Khost, southeast of the capital, Kabul, according to the US Geological Survey. Its relatively shallow depth of six miles exacerbated its impact, as “strong and long tremors” were felt in Kabul and tremors were felt as far away as Lahore in Pakistan, 300 miles from the epicenter.

Afghans dig a trench for a mass grave of their relatives who were killed in an earthquake at the Poria site in Jayan village, in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, Thursday, June 23, 2022. [AP Photo/Ebrahim Nooroozi]

Thousands were forced to sleep in the open in unbearable, near-freezing temperatures as entire villages, built largely of mud and straw, collapsed. The country’s very limited infrastructure makes it very difficult to provide relief. Afghanistan’s structural health care system is unable to adapt under normal circumstances, let alone deal with the natural disasters that have plagued the country. With few planes and helicopters airworthy, the government was forced to cancel emergency search and rescue operations after 24 hours and issue an urgent appeal for international aid.

These appalling conditions are the result of Afghanistan’s disastrous confrontation with US imperialism. It began in 1979 with the intervention of the Carter administration and the CIA to fund and arm Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, in a proxy war against the Soviet-backed government.

US imperialism believed that it could use the dissolution of the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an opportunity to overcome its economic decline abroad and its social conflicts at home, using its military power to oversee a “New World Order” to the benefit of its corporations. and the financial elite.

In October 2001, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the United States launched a war and occupation, pursuing economic interests hidden from the public under the guise of a “war on terror” against a government that allegedly harbored bin Laden.

The human and social costs of the war in Afghanistan were catastrophic and continue to this day. According to official figures that undoubtedly underestimate casualties, 164,436 Afghans were killed during the war, along with 2,448 American soldiers, 3,846 American military contractors, and 1,144 soldiers from other NATO countries. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans and tens of thousands of NATO personnel were wounded. The war and occupation cost the American people about $2 trillion, with another $6.5 trillion that has gone into interest payments over the years.

The war produced the largest number of refugees in the world. As of the beginning of this year, before the war in Ukraine, about 1 in 10 Afghans – that’s 3 million people – were refugees, most of them living in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. Three out of four Afghans have experienced internal or external displacement in their lifetime.

According to the World Bank, Afghanistan is the sixth poorest country in the world, with a per capita GNI of only $500. The United Nations estimates that 23 million Afghans, or more than half the population, suffer from acute hunger. An estimated 8.7 million are at risk of starvation, while 5 million children are on the brink of starvation. This was before commodity prices surged over the past several months.

The Afghan war, oddly named Operation Enduring Freedom, has produced an entirely new lexicon of criminal activities: Extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, drone warfare, and waterboarding, to name a few.

It was WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange who, by publishing in 2010 the Afghan War Logs, a large collection of leaked US military documents, drew the world’s attention to evidence of war criminality. The Afghan war records debunk the myth that the occupation of Afghanistan was a “good war”, supposedly waged to defeat terrorism, establish democracy, and protect women’s rights.

They have exposed the mass killing of civilians by US and British forces, and the underreporting and cover-up of civilian deaths and war crimes, including on numerous occasions when American and British forces opened fire on civilians. But none of the criminals responsible for the war were ever prosecuted, let alone punished. Instead, it is Assange who has been languishing in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London for the past three years, awaiting extradition to the United States on charges under the Espionage Act that carry a 175-year prison sentence.

Afghanistan’s plight has been further exacerbated by Washington’s theft of Afghanistan’s financial assets and the imposition of an economic blockade on the country – the equivalent of starving the country to death – after the Taliban took control of last summer amid a humiliating withdrawal of the US military from its longest war ever. .

The White House has left the country in ruins and facing a massive humanitarian catastrophe. Throughout the twenty years of occupation, the United States and its allies have done nothing to develop Afghanistan. Instead, its economy was shattered, and agriculture was undermined by so-called aid. This, along with insecurity, drought and natural disasters, played into the hands of warlords and drug dealers in Afghanistan, as poor farmers turned to poppy cultivation and the opium trade.

The catastrophic state of Afghanistan underscores the devastating impact of four decades of US imperialism’s covert operations, war and occupation on what was already one of the poorest countries on the planet. It should serve as a warning to workers around the world about what the United States and NATO have in store for Ukraine.

In her most recent New York Times article, published on February 23, the late Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton from 1997 until 2001 – as did many other commentators – warned that if Russia invaded Ukraine, It would be a repeat of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014; it would be a scenario reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.”

She was referring to the United States’ use of proxy forces during the 1980s, supported, hosted, trained, trained by Pakistan and financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, to overthrow the Soviet-allied Afghan government and undermine Moscow’s influence in the Caspian Basin and the Gulf states. The Arabian Gulf. Afghanistan itself is a treasure trove of untapped minerals, estimated at $1 to $3 trillion.

In the conflicts and mass destruction that followed the collapse of the pro-Soviet regime, the Taliban rose to power with Washington’s blessing in the belief that the Taliban would help stabilize Afghanistan after 15 years of war, while at the same time practicing. Increase pressure on China and Russia.

Albright’s words should be taken seriously. In 1996, when she was the US ambassador to the United Nations, the “60 Minutes” news program asked her if she thought about the price the Iraqi people were paying for the devastating US sanctions imposed on Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, which deprived Iraq of medicine. and food and at least 500,000 Iraqi children were killed at that time. “We think the price is worth it,” Albright replied, without denying the number.

After two decades of proxy wars and a US-backed military occupation, Afghanistan has been ravaged by brutality and poverty. Its fate is a warning of what US imperialism hides from everything it touches, whether it be nominal “allies” or the targets of US regime change operations.

With America’s ever-widening war against Russia, the United States is preparing to bring the kind of devastation inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq to Europe, at an even greater cost in lives and treasure.

What WSWS wrote about the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001

From the start, WSWS exposed Washington’s lies that its illegal invasion of Afghanistan was an act of self-defense in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11.

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