15 Years of War & Occupation in
AFGHANISTAN
By Nita Palmer
More than a decade and a half has passed since the first US bombs began to rain down on Afghanistan, adding their scars to the lush green valleys and soaring mountain peaks already marred by decades of war. The US-NATO coalition charged into Afghanistan with promises of liberation and a better life for the Afghan people. This would of course be brought about by the defeat of the Taliban, those terrible rulers who allegedly harboured those responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Like all those would-be conquerors and ‘liberators’ who came before them, however, US and NATO forces found themselves caught in the Afghan trap which is known as ‘the graveyard of empires’. To take control of Afghanistan should have been child’s play for the great might of the United States Army and their allies. The country had no real military to speak of, or even a complex government structure to dismantle. Yet sixteen years later, US-NATO forces have not achieved ‘victory’ in Afghanistan. Various commentators and analysts speculate about the nature of the USNATO failure in Afghanistan: perhaps there were not enough troops? Was the corruption too rampant, or Afghan society too tribal? Opinions abound, but most miss the mark: Afghans do not want foreign occupiers on their land, or those who would attempt to ‘liberate’ them at gunpoint. Resistance to foreign occupation is in the very bones of the Afghan people, and there
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can be no victory over a people who will fight until their last breath against foreign invaders.
UN data. At least 1,601 civilians were killed. Nearly all the deaths – 1,509 of them – were children.
The US and NATO will never destroy the Afghan resistance. However, they can – and have – destroyed millions of Afghan lives. At least tens of thousands of Afghans have lost their lives in the war. In fact, the number of victims is more likely in the hundreds of thousands, but accurate records have never been kept. These victims leave behind children that will grow up without a mother or father, parents who will never again hear the sweet laughter of their child, brothers and sisters with whom they will never again play.
Today, 623,000 Afghans are internally displaced, forced to abandon their homes due to lack of security or ability to find work to feed their families. The United Nations predicts this number will increase by 450,000 in 2017. In addition, the UN expects nearly a million refugees who have been living in Pakistan to be forced to return to Afghanistan later this year. This would leave nearly 10% of the Afghan population without homes.
US air strikes increased by 40% in 2016, the fifteenth year of war. The first half of 2016 saw the highest civilian casualty rate since recordkeeping began in 2009, according to
“The constant stream of displaced families means that a state of continual emergency has become the norm in Afghanistan,” said Danielle Moylan, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Each year, dozens Afghans – mainly children and the elderly – die of
U.S. plane attacked the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan killing 42 patients and health workers and injuring many more. 2015.
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