WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th August, 2021) ASHINGTON, August 25 (Sputnik), Barrington M. Salmon - The United States blew several opportunities to get involved in the reconciliation process with the Taliban over the years, which would have allowed the Americans to execute a safer exit and avoid the surprise collapse of Kabul, former State Department official Matthew Hoh told Sputnik.
For more than a week, the US has overseen a chaotic and disorganized exit from Afghanistan amid and in the wake of the Taliban seizure of Kabul, which fell on August 15. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said the US has evacuated a total of 70,700 Americans and Afghan special visa applicants since August 14. Meanwhile, vast crowds of Afghans who worked for the past 20 years with the US military and others seeking to escape living under Taliban rule, have flocked to the airport.
"There were plenty of opportunities to negotiate with the Taliban," Hoh said. "I was a State Department official in 2009. There were elements of the Taliban who wanted to talk. [Afghan President] Hamid Karzai, [US diplomat] Richard Holbrooke and his British counterpart all said the US was the biggest impediment to peace."
Hoh, a former US marine captain who resigned from the State Department in 2009 in protest of the US war strategy in Afghanistan, said the sequence of events currently playing out was not inevitable but for American policy.
"What has occurred now was inevitable because the US framed this in terms of achieving victory. If you say, 'we're gonna win,' that causes defeat," Hoh said. "They could have chosen not to pursue a victory policy - such as pushing to defeat the Taliban although they offered to surrender."
Hoh, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a member of the Eisenhower Media Initiative, said the United States ended up choosing the path of occupying a nation and jumping into a civil war. In addition, he said, the logic to occupy Afghanistan was flawed anyway.
"In 2001, the terrorist act was committed by a group of between 200 and 400 people. The US chose to get in the middle of a civil war when Afghanistan was doing little more than serving as a hotel for terrorists," he explained. "Afghanistan was not integral to the planning of 9/11. They were doing planning in places like Malaysia, Qatar and the UAE."
There are a lot of things the US could have done, he added, including making sure that Pashtuns were included in the government, among other actions.
"They could have chosen not to put the same warlords back in power," Hoh said.
The United States could also have stood on preconditions such as them accepting the government and protecting women's rights, Hoh added.
Hoh said these wars have very little to do with Afghans but with the interests of other nations and the country's 38 million people have been suffering from what has often been proxy wars.
"The Afghan government completely victimized the Pashtuns [in the] south and east. And the narrative of this war being to defend women's rights and human rights is not true," he said. "An entire generation of Afghans were not able to get access to education. One-third of Afghan children are out of school. This narrative is repeated to generate and sustain support for the war."
Hoh said he's not surprised at all by what's happened recently. In the end, the Afghan military and police refused to back a corrupt government.
"But like everybody else, I'm surprised by how quickly the Taliban achieved its objective. I have found very little discussion about this from major American networks. I have seen this from foreign correspondents who don't work for major American networks," he said. "Looking now, a week removed, it makes sense. The Taliban has been planning this for a long time, more than a year. They have been very successful militarily. They negotiated, made deals. I did believe they would take Kabul successfully. And anyone who observed, understood the Taliban's capability and respected what the Taliban could do would have arrived at this conclusion."
A contributing factor to the collapse, Hoh argued is that the Afghan government and military were built on a "house of cards."
"Have you ever seen a house of cards fall slowly? The military leadership and the government were completely corrupt. They were kept in place by the presence of foreign money. The whole thing unraveled," he said. "There is something to it that Joe Biden influenced [the outcome] but he was not the primary/main cause."
Hoh said there is a great deal of anger and feelings of betrayal among veterans.
"I've been feeling it for a long time. I've been doing 8-9 interviews a day for the past week," said Hoh. "Talking about it gets me out. But I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to really absorb it all. Veterans are angry and despondent. I have been heartbroken for the Afghans. When I look at or consider the lies and corruption of war, that is where my anger is. The people who led wars and lied about it are the ones major corporate media trot out. The duplicity of major American media with these wars, the responsibility they have for these wars is the same as those who led and conducted them."
Hoh described the scale of the corruption and theft going on in Afghanistan for the past two decades as a massive Ponzi scheme.
"We're working under a system where 40 percent of the money never leaves the US. This is overhead and management costs. And subcontractors get their cuts," he said. "The assumption is that 10 cents of every Dollars actually went to schools, hospitals and development projects. The scale and scope of this is breathtaking. It's a grift, a racket. It started in the Balkans, this idea of conducting a war with construction and logistics companies. Everyone knew it was corrupt and crooked."
He also said the occupation was "a huge war profiteering effort."
"The Inspector General went to look for medical centers, hospitals and schools and they were not where they said they were. The coordinates of some places was in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea," Hoh pointed out.
In Afghanistan, Hoh said, about 90 percent of the people live on $2 a day and 70 percent live on $1 a day. And as the US war in Afghanistan draws to a close, the US is saddled with $1 trillion in debt and interest payments that taxpayers will pay.
"Banks are making great deals of money. Afghans are not only to blame for corruption. Americans are corrupt too. Ours is just legally accepted forms of corruption," Hoh said.
To call the soldiers and police cowards for not wanting to continue fighting the Taliban is misleading, Hoh said.
"The Afghan military didn't want to fight because they didn't want to fight for this government. As far as the Afghan military and government was concerned, this was a business investment," he said. "The soldiers and police needed the money to feed their families. The military commanders stopped giving out money and for at least two months the police and military didn't receive pay."
The former marine then underscored at least one of the reasons behind the decision to stop fighting.
"The Taliban became a better option," Hoh concluded.
