Autoempire

A lack haunts cultural memory today – the lack of history. All the professional opinion-havers of legacy media have rejoiced in their cynical incredulity at the almost immediate collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s sham government. Did anyone seriously believe that it would persist past the foreign military occupation of Afghanistan? Surely this cannot be the case, given the blanket indifference the media has paid to the war over recent years. Much has been made of the shocking nature at how quickly the Taliban retook the country. Military officials, politicians, and the assorted apparatchiks of Western imperialism have feigned surprise. Such reactions cannot simply be ascribed to plain stupidity, for they are far more likely a result of the extreme cynicism that characterises our time. Corruption and corporate looting abounded during the whole of the occupation, and Afghans obviously did not feel inspired by an American-educated academic who spent time at the World Bank. And so begins a new era in Afghanistan. As I write this, on the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the flag of the Taliban is raised above the presidential palace in Kabul.

The peace deal agreed between the Taliban and the U.S. by the Trump administration has suited Biden very well. It has been mentioned frequently in the press that Biden was against Obama’s 2009 troop surge, yet events like the murder of ten people including seven children by drone strike on 29th August, prove that Biden’s defiance in the face of the war industry’s appetite for continued direct engagement in Afghanistan, does not extend to foregoing a perpetual drone war. We are witnessing an alteration in tactic and a change in target, not a rupture at the heart of the war machine, no matter the theatrical drum-beating by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, or Tony Blair’s yelps about “strategy”. In broader terms, all this can be seen as furthering the pivot towards China that increasingly characterises Anglophone foreign policy. As Mohsin Hamid has pointed out, the contemporary relations fostered with the ethno-nationalist autocracy of Modi’s India in service of the attempt to tackle Chinese power, bears a certain worrying resemblance to the context of the 1979 proxy war between America and the Soviets. The U.S. continues as it ever has done, funding reactionary groups and hard-right governments to maintain their hegemony and to further the interests of big business.

It is well known, yet bears constant repeating, that America and its allies vociferously supported the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets, paving the way for their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam to be translated into a political project.

The end of the longest war in U.S. history has given expression to what imperialism is at base – it is capitalism in decay, as this sardonic passage of Lenin’s illustrates:

“Capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (England).”

It transpires that ‘Global Britain’, the flagship foreign policy in the post-EU UK, is going extremely well, as the Biden administration ignored entirely the ineffectual pronouncements of the now ejected foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, at the need to secure Western interests and to extend the evacuation deadline. The UK is descending into near-total irrelevancy in world affairs. It has almost entirely isolated itself from all major power blocs, and as global influence dwindles, its historic failures and contradictions wash up on its shores. The Empire always comes home to the Metropole, as Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault have variously noted. In his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault suggests that from the end of the 16th century, colonial “models” were brought back to the West, and began a process of “internal colonialism” – a thesis known as the “Imperial Boomerang”. Of this phenomenon there is no end of examples, yet to take some recent ones, one could point to the shambolic management of supply lines and global trade, the aggressive class warfare of the national insurance hike, the slow-death mechanisms directed at the 2.5 million users of foodbanks or perhaps the increasingly brutal, racist policing in a post 9/11 security-obsessed world. The callous, idiotic nature of colonial rule has made its full migration back home.

It is in this context that I find those suggesting that we ‘should not turn our back’ on Afghanistan, because of those that will be persecuted and killed by the Taliban, repellent in the extreme. Every intervention that the imperial powers have made in Afghanistan has only served to distribute the pandemonium to the furthest corners of life there. The twisted alliance between liberal academics and war hawks immediately following the 9/11 attacks is a position that holds less and less sway, despite the best efforts of such writers. That the war on terror has ever aimed at improving the lot of ethnic and religious minorities, women, LGBTQI+ people, or whatever other identity the blood-soaked war ghouls have decided to use as a crutch in justifying their desire for destruction and the enrichment of military contractors, is a view peddled by those who would sacrifice the world to Moloch.

And yet keen media consumers, such as we are all increasingly becoming, will have noticed that the images of the Taliban have changed somewhat. Many of the Taliban’s soldiers have adopted the distinctly American spec-ops gear loadout and aesthetic, reflecting how the war has only made the Taliban more disciplined, both as a military group and as a political actor.

It remains to be seen how much truth there is to reports of internal struggles in the new government, yet they would not be out of the ordinary for such transitions of power. In a certain way, the stated aim of bringing ‘democracy and freedom’ (American culture and capitalism) to Afghanistan succeeded, despite the fact that it was never the point – extracting natural resources was. In absorbing Western techniques of administration and military organisation, the Taliban have simultaneously made it quite clear that they care not for recognition by the West. But of course, all commentary on this is hopelessly shot through with the fact that most of us in the imperial core have only experienced any of the war through the widening gyre of media in the postmodern era. Fragmentary and without sequence, clips of militants executing civilians, flags being raised over resistance strongholds, and promotions for new commodities, flow effortlessly through each terminal of the media system.

This article went to print on 22/09/21

Tom Beed is a writer, actor, and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. He has a degree in International Relations and Politics from Oxford Brookes University.