Submitted by Dan Winchester

Within the last week, Taliban forces have taken advantage of our withdrawal to sweep across the entire country. The New York Times mournfully compares the US leaving Afghanistan to the betrayal at the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. But that claim is misleading. The Taliban do now control most of Afghanistan, but their success doesn’t parallel that of North Vietnam. The fall of Saigon was the culmination of a spring offensive by the North Vietnamese army against that of the South, which had a real army (in spite of our supply embargo). There was no such offensive in Afghanistan. The Afghan army was a fake army that “collapsed under pressure” without a shot being fired. The Taliban didn’t “win” militarily: it was unopposed.

There’ve been several articles in papers of record trying to explain the Taliban’s sudden, unexpected “win.” Most of them center on our “chaotic withdrawal.” The Afghan army wouldn’t fight to defend its country because the corrupt, pro-globalist client-state the U.S. installed in Afghanistan wasn’t its country; our hasty withdrawal only brought this to light. Even CNN is blaming the Biden Administration’s for the incompetent haste that occasioned this surrender. Democrats reflexively blame former President Trump, who first decided to withdraw from Afghanistan. 

Few acknowledge that the U.S. is not actually withdrawing. The New York Times reports that U.S. military and intelligence agencies did everything they could to prevent Trump from withdrawing and tried to do the same with Biden. Now that the withdrawal is underway, these same people have determined that our formal presence in Afghanistan will end but our informal presence will not. The acting Air Force Secretary John Roth has already said they have a plan for “Over the Horizon” airstrikes over Afghanistan from air bases in Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. And it was rumored as early as December of 2020 that Blackwater “could replace US soldiers in Afghanistan”. Later, in May, NY Magazine reported that American firms were capitalizing on the withdrawal by hiring more security contractors who, even before our withdrawal, outnumbered American troops in Afghanistan by a ratio of 2 to 1. Given this recent increase in the number of contractors and the effort put into avoiding even a formal withdrawl of America’s forces, it seems likely that the U.S. never intended to leave.

Notwithstanding the U.S.’s forced departure, it’s not clear that recent events are the result of mere incompetence. They may seem to be unintentional: another example of our regime’s ongoing incompetence. But just as there’s evidence that our withdrawal is not really a withdrawal, there’s evidence that classifying the Taliban’s rapid sweep across Afghanistan as an incompetent “defeat” for the U.S. hides the truth of it – Afghanistan has been and continues to be a very profitable venture for the occupational class. 

The Taliban doesn’t pose a serious threat to the occupational class’s ongoing interests in Afghanistan. True, the Taliban is a nationalist Islamist group; it’s presence in Afghanistan shouldn’t benefit the members of a globalist empire. But the Taliban’s principles are not as important as their willingness to cooperate with the occupational class. This was also the case with ISIL.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was the subject of much news until recently. As one writer insightfully notes, ISIL is an Islamist militant group that strangely fights “Not wars against Christians in Europe or America – or even Jews in Israel – no they fight wars against other muslims”: Assad in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Houthis in Yemen. They even fight against China and Iran in Afghanistan.” This is all public knowledge.

Absent from this list is Israel. Despite being nominally antisemitic, ISIL has published an article explaining their decision not to attack Israel. ISIL is known to have accidentally fired on the IDF once, for which it then apologized. ISIL therefore only attacks a list of enemies that are a) nationalist, and b) curiously resembles the occupational class’s list of enemies–and it does so with American munitions. 

As everyone now knows, ISIL is not the only group to have recently benefited from American largess. Billions of dollars the Pentagon spent on training Afghan forces has “accidentally” benefited the Taliban, who have now seized vehicles, missiles, and aircraft from Bagram airfield. Our accidental assistance has extended not only to munitions but personnel. The exact terms of the peace agreement between the United States and Taliban, signed by Trump last year, are not known. But it’s known that this agreement called for a handover of exactly 5000 Taliban prisoners–the same number left at Bagram Airbase. It’s no wonder that theories about the Taliban’s close ties to the U.S. are now becoming more popular.

Would the globalist occupational class gain from the Taliban’s assumption of power in Afghanistan? ISIL is an international organization, while the Taliban is Afghan-centered. How can they be on the same side? 

The Taliban isn’t necessarily an obstacle to the continued plunder of Afghanistan by the occupational class, but that is beside the point because Afghanistan was never the principal object of plunder by the elite. The wealth to be extracted from the war in Afghanistan by the occupational class came not from that country but principally from what remains of the American middle-class. To argue that this class would only work with international groups like ISIL to that purpose is to argue that the occupational class operates on some sort of principle. But it does not. The only principle the occupational class holds dear is its own power and prestige. That Afghanistan will be ruled by the nationalist Taliban is certainly not a welcome change to them, but it’s likely that the Taliban will be kept on a tight leash. Recall: we haven’t actually left. The Taliban will cooperate, or it’s leadership will receive a visit from “over the horizon”–or perhaps from ISIL itself.  

The occupational class stands to gain from the Taliban in Afghanistan what it gained from ISIL in the Levant. In response to the threat of ISIL, the U.S. remained in Iraq long after it planned to withdraw. ISIL allowed US bombers to attack Syria under the guise of attacking ISIL, allowed Turkey to move into northern Syria, and Israel to reinforce the Golan Heights. Thousands of Syrian refugees were resettled in the West, the political effects of which we have only begun to see and which benefit the occupational class. Billions in aid were transferred to these refugees and their handlers. Billions more were transferred from the American middle-class to the occupational class in the name of protecting Americans from the foreign legion middle-class wealth had helped to arm. ISIL, for its part, fought every nationalist government that threatened the occupational class’s control in the region. Why would it be any different with a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan? 

“Mistakes,” “incompetence” and “wishful thinking” on the part of Americans are now being discussed at length. Even intelligent writers such as Mike Anton (of who I am a fan) are talking about the errors of “spreading democracy” and “counter-terrorism” as if they were the real aims of the war in Afghanistan, instead of mendacious and long-discredited lies told by a criminal class and its brown-nosers. Living as we do in the immediate aftermath of seasonal race riots and the stolen election of later that year, any argument that presumes our elites are–or ever have been–interested in principles like “counter-terrorism” and “democracy” helps to hide that class’s true nature as a kakistocracy.