SHAFAQNA– Seventeen years after U.S. forces and the Northern Alliance captured Kabul, the war is dragging on, many Afghans place the blame squarely on the Americans.
The United States has lost more than 2,400 soldiers in its longest war, and has spent more than $900 billion on everything from military operations to the construction of roads, bridges and power plants.
Since President Trump announced a new Afghan strategy last August and committed more troops to the country, the number of bombs dropped by the U.S. coalition has surged dramatically, Forbes reported.
But it has not worked and also led to more civilian deaths. Last month, the UN announced that the number of civilian casualties in the first nine months of 2018 is higher than in any year since it started documenting them in 2009.
“From the period of May 1 to the most current data as of Oct. 1, 2018, the average number of casualties the [Afghan forces] suffered is the greatest it has ever been during like periods,” NATO’s mission in the country, Resolute Support, told SIGAR recently.
After years, Afghanistan is rife with conspiracy theories, including the idea that Americans didn’t stumble into a forever war, but planned one all along.
Mohammed Ismail Qasimyar, a member of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, wonders how U.S. and NATO forces — which at their peak numbered 150,000 and fought alongside hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops, were unable to vanquish tens of thousands of Taliban.
“Either they did not want to or they could not do it,” he said. He now suspects the U.S. and its ally Pakistan deliberately sowed chaos in Afghanistan to justify the lingering presence of foreign forces — now numbering around 15,000 — in order to use the country as a listening post to monitor Iran, Russia and China.
“They have made a hell, not a paradise for us,” he said.
After last month’s assassination of Kandahar’s powerful police chief, Gen. Abdul Raziq, social media exploded with pictures and posts suggesting he was the victim of a U.S. conspiracy. Recent insider attacks, in which Afghan forces have killed their erstwhile U.S. and NATO allies, have attracted online praise.
“For a number of years things worked perfectly well,” he said in a recent interview. “Then we saw the United States either changed course or simply neglected the views of the Afghan people and the conditions of the Afghans”, said Hamid Karzai, who was installed as Afghanistan’s first president and twice won re-election, serving until 2014.
He blames the lingering war on the U.S. failure to eliminate militant sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, the bombing of Afghan villages and homes, and the detention of Afghans in raids.
Others blame the notoriously corrupt government, which Karzai headed for more than a decade, and which is widely seen as yet another bitter fruit of the American invasion.
Hajji Akram, a day laborer in Kabul’s Old City who struggles to feed his family on around $4 a day, said “The foreigners are not making things better. They should go.”
HamidullahNasrat sells imported fabrics in the capital’s main bazaar on the banks of the Kabul River said that How is it that a superpower like the United States cannot stop the Taliban? It is a question every Afghan is asking.”
It’s not just Afghans. half of The United States’ adults (49%) say the United States has mostly failed in achieving its goals there, while about a third (35%) say it has mostly succeeded, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
John Sopko inspector general for Afghanistan’s reconstruction offered a blistering critique in a speech in Ohio earlier this month, saying the U.S. has spent $132 billion on Afghanistan’s reconstruction — more than was spent on Western Europe after World War II. Another $750 billion has been spent on U.S. military operations, and Washington has pledged $4 billion a year for Afghanistan’s security forces.
“Even after 17 years of U.S. and coalition effort and financial largesse, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest, least educated, and most corrupt countries in the world,” Sopko said. “It is also one of the most violent”, Associated Press reported.