Why Afghanistan is Important

Picking my through a morning paper choked with stories on Ebola -- now that the virus has arrived in the wealthy West, the column inches devoted to the outbreak have ballooned -- there is not much that jumps out. Azam Ahmed has a useful recapitulation, "Ambush by the Taliban Kills 14 in Afghan Forces," of the Taliban's increased military activity over the last year in the context of a recent spate of terror bombings and attacks on Afghan forces:

The Taliban have waged heavy offensives this year, deeply cutting into Afghan security forces who for the first time have full responsibility for the country’s security. Many areas that had once been considered safe have been roiled, especially in the north. And in traditional areas of insurgent strength, mostly in the south and east, the Taliban have made many gains.

Driving the insecurity in many areas is the lack of international forces, who have completely handed over security to their Afghan counterparts. For the first time in years, there are widespread reports of insurgents massing in large groups to attack, banking on the international coalition’s limited ability to conduct airstrikes. 

In response, American forces have stepped up airstrikes, conducting more in August than they had over the past two years in total, according to the United States Central Command.

For example, officials in the southeastern province of Paktia claimed that such strikes had killed seven civilians, including a child, who were collecting firewood on a mountaintop near the provincial capital, Gardez. 

The International Security Assistance Force rejected that account, however, saying in a statement that the airstrike “resulted in the death of eight armed enemy combatants.”

President Ashraf Ghani’s office released a separate statement saying, “The president is looking at every civilian casualty incident with much importance, and has asked for a full investigation of this unfortunate incident.” 

Taliban violence has been especially heavy around the country in recent days. 

In the highly secure city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the financial capital of northern Afghanistan, attackers dressed as policemen detonated suicide vests at the provincial police headquarters on Sunday, killing at least two officers and wounding nine others. And a mix of bombs, rockets and ambushes in the provinces of Wardak, Nangarhar, Kunduz, Kunar and Laghman, as well as in the capital city, Kabul, resulted in the deaths of at least 18 others in the last two days.

I've been trying to keep up with the news coming out of Afghanistan because like the Iranian Revolution, the civil war in Afghanistan, stoked for decades by foreign powers, is ontologically connected to our currently exhausted globally dominant neoliberal paradigm. Neoliberalism spreads its tentacles at the same time -- the late-1970s -- that Afghanistan is destabilized, becoming a Petri dish for the use of jihadi proxies against communism.

Paying attention to which way Afghanistan is trending, I believe, offers insight into the dialectical path of an enervated neoliberalism. For instance, if the Taliban is successful, routs the Ashraf Ghani government in Kabul, which right now certainly seems a possible outcome, then I think this presages an attempt to maintain neoliberalism by means of a brutal, medieval religious fundamentalism.

In a way, I think we are already there. This is what Islamic State is. Whipped up by the U.S., Turkey and oil-rich Gulf emirates, ISIS seeks to remake boundaries of the Middle East at the expense of the Kurds and the Shia without in anyway questioning the legitimacy of the global neoliberal order.

As Samir Amin notes in a recent article, "The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism," the "Islamization" of politics in the contemporary South is an acknowledgement by leaders within the U.S. that neoliberalism can only be maintained through chaos:

Can there be a possible return to the national popular model of the Bandung era, maybe with a hint of democracy? Or a more pronounced crystallization of a democratic, popular, and national front? Or a plunge into a backward-looking illusion that, in this context, takes on the form of an “Islamization” of politics and society? 

In the conflict over—in much confusion—these three possible responses to the challenge, the Western powers (the United States and its subaltern European allies) have made their choice: they have given preferential support to the Muslim Brotherhood and/or other “Salafist” organizations of political Islam. The reason for that is simple and obvious: these reactionary political forces accept exercising their power within globalized neoliberalism (and thus abandoning any prospect for social justice and national independence). That is the sole objective pursued by the imperialist powers. 

Consequently, political Islam’s program belongs to the type of fascism found in dependent societies. In fact, it shares with all forms of fascism two fundamental characteristics: (1) the absence of a challenge to the essential aspects of the capitalist order (and in this context this amounts to not challenging the model of lumpen development connected to the spread of globalized neoliberal capitalism); and (2) the choice of anti-democratic, police-state forms of political management (such as the prohibition of parties and organizations, and forced Islamization of morals). 

The anti-democratic option of the imperialist powers (which gives the lie to the pro-democratic rhetoric found in the flood of propaganda to which we are subjected), then, accepts the possible “excesses” of the Islamic regimes in question. Like other types of fascism and for the same reasons, these excesses are inscribed in the “genes” of their modes of thought: unquestioned submission to leaders, fanatic valorization of adherence to the state religion, and the formation of shock forces used to impose submission. In fact, and this can be seen already, the “Islamist” program makes progress only in the context of a civil war (between, among others, Sunnis and Shias) and results in nothing other than permanent chaos. This type of Islamist power is, then, the guarantee that the societies in question will remain absolutely incapable of asserting themselves on the world scene. It is clear that a declining United States has given up on getting something better—a stable and submissive local government—in favor of this “second best.”

But there is also the possibility that the medievalism being forced upon us will fail. Possibly Ashraf Ghani is as great a man as Ralph Nader says he is, and he will clear a new path for Afghanistan. Maybe the Marxist-inspired YPG will triumph over the Islamic State in Kobani, showing us that populist humanism is not dead yet.