Shortly after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996 (their rise to
power itself a result of the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan), we began
to hear endless stories of the horrors of this student movement turned governing
power. They ruled by Sharia law, they treated women badly, they even blew
up ancient statues!
The US rhetoric against the Taliban began long before the attacks of 9/11 (which
were carried out largely by Saudis who trained in Afghanistan with the knowledge
of the Taliban). But it was the 9/11 attacks that opened the door to a direct
US intervention in Afghanistan.
However, an operation that was Congressionally authorized primarily to seek
out and punish those who planned and executed the attacks on New York and Washington
very quickly morphed into a “regime change” operation to “liberate” the Afghans
from Taliban rule. So focused was the US on “regime change” that 9/11 mastermind
Osama bin Laden was able to slip
out of the US grasp at Tora Bora and make his way to Pakistan.
From an operation to retaliate for an attack on US soil, the Afghan operation
soon became a nation-building operation where the focus shifted from US security
to the plight
of women formerly under Taliban rule. The US government’s marketing geniuses
even tried to “re-brand
Afghanistan” to the tune of $4.8 million.
So after 15 years and well over one trillion dollars spent, after tens of thousands
of dead Afghanis and several thousand US and allied soldiers, after the country
has been ripped apart by war with no economy left, what has been achieved?
US intervention in Afghanistan has succeeded in replacing the Taliban threat
with something even worse! As with Iraq, Libya, and Syria, there was no ISIS
in Afghanistan before the US intervention. Today after 15 years of US “liberation”
ISIS is not only making inroads into Afghanistan, it is turning the country
into a bloodbath.
Just yesterday a coordinated
ISIS suicide bomb attack in Kabul blew apart more than 80 innocent demonstrators.
And who is ISIS’s bitterest foe in Afghanistan? No, not the US. It
is the Taliban.
This is intervention laid bare: it replaces one set of “bad guys” with another
whole new level of bad guys. It spreads not peace and freedom, but death and
ISIS. US foreign interventionism is a cancer.
Daniel McAdams is director of the The
Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity. Reprinted from The Ron Paul
Institute for Peace & Prosperity.