Today, Kabul. Tomorrow, Baghdad | Profile

The withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan has provoked a discussion in which certain concepts must be integrated. Certain categories that Fukuyama developed in The End of the Story can allow us to go beyond the accessory.

It is not true that the United States is leaving Afghanistan too soon, but that it should never have invaded that country. Nobody called them, the majority of Afghans do not want their democracy, they wanted to kill a terrorist who was elsewhere, they executed him twelve years ago. Why did they continue where they had nothing to do?

The United States and NATO trained and equipped collaborators and an army of Afghans which dissolved as soon as they learned of the Americans’ departure. President Ashraf Ghani immediately escaped with four cars and a helicopter loaded with banknotes.

After twenty years of war, 7,432 invading soldiers died, 51,191 Afghans classified as insurgents, 71,000 civilians and 73,000 members of an Afghan army armed by the United States. There are 2.6 million refugees in Iran and Pakistan, and 3.5 million internally displaced people. The war officially cost the United States $ 978 billion, the United Kingdom $ 30 billion, and Germany $ 19 billion.

The reasons Hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Americans and people of other nationalities have experienced the horror of war and found themselves with psychological problems that will cause further misery in their countries. All this for what ? So that?

The United States invaded Afghanistan to avenge the attack on the Twin Towers orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, who lived in Afghanistan. They ravaged a country to kill a person who was in another. They never understood Islam.

Islamists are not interested in belonging to countries that the West invented when it dissolved the Ottoman Caliphate. Above all, they identify with the community of believers. The attack on the Twin Towers was planned by Bin Laden, led by an Egyptian, 15 Saudis participated, 2 Emiratis, their base was in Afghanistan. They do not have a religious authority which interprets the Koran in an obligatory way, but groups of jurists who study it in each place.

Almost all of America’s allies opposed the invasion of Iraq

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1978, it provoked a reaction from all Islamists. The United States supported them because they fought the USSR, armed and trained a group led by Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden.

There has been a massive migration of Afghans to Pakistan, thousands of children have been educated in Pakistani madrasas within the orthodox Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. They were called “catechists”, Taliban in the Pashtun language. Most of them are Pashtuns, managing 13 million Afghans and 30 million Pakistanis, whose identity is Pashtun.

In 2001, after the attack on the Twin Towers, the United States landed in Afghanistan to eliminate Osama bin Laden. They were in the wrong country, he lived in two Pashtun cities in Pakistan: Peshawar and Abbottabad, the area where Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are located. For a Westerner, it is difficult to visit the Oras Valley, where this city is located, due to the hostility of the population and strict military surveillance. The huge building in which bin Laden lived was to be protected by the Pakistani army.

In 2003, the United States and its allies invaded Iraq on the false accusation of possessing weapons of mass destruction. Almost all of its allies, France, Germany, Spain, opposed a war in which only the United States and the United Kingdom participated. The only rational explanation for the invasion can be found in David Owen’s book, The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power, which attributes it to the deification of Bush and Blair.

Some Westerners believe that other cultures are their past and that these societies are ignorant. They assumed the Iraqis would applaud the troops who brought “democracy” and “stability” and met almost unanimous resistance. They hanged the authorities, they started killing 134,000 civilians, they spent billions to install a democracy which is rejected by the vast majority and which will explode when the occupation troops are withdrawn.

They razed a country where no one had called them. An Iraqi army officer proclaimed himself caliph by taking the name of Muhammad’s father-in-law, Abu Bakr, proclaimed the Islamic State and this led to another massacre. ISIS’s actions have rocked us with their cruelty to those of us who believe in human rights and peace.

Biden has announced that he will withdraw US troops from Iraq soon and the scene in Kabul will repeat itself: those who collaborated in the invasion will panic, they will want to flee, some will take planes with tickets, the Americans will shamefully withdraw from the invasion. ‘a country they should never have.

Islam. It is difficult for Christians to understand the global nature of Islam. It is not a belief system, nor an ideology, nor a religion, but a system which encompasses all aspects of human life, a framework which determines their private, social, economic and political life.

Muhammad was the only founder of an important religion who was also a warrior, mayor, king. In this culture there is no room for the separation of religion and state which has been achieved in Christendom. The Quran is a collection of verses recited directly by Allah through the mouth of the prophet. His texts are a copy of a copy of the book which is in heaven, eternal and unalterable. It admits nothing other than the literal interpretation of its texts.

In a seminar, I heard the leaders of Tamarrud (rebellion) say, the most important movement of the Egyptian Arab Spring: “There is only one thing worse than a military dictatorship: a government dominated by fundamentalists. religious. They explained why their leader Mohamed Abdelaziz and the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed el-Baradei supported General al-Sisi’s coup against Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected Egyptian president. El-Baradei was in exile for thirty years, he returned to the fall of Mubarak, but faced with the obscurantism of the Muslim Brotherhood, he went into the opposition and ended up accepting the vice-presidency of the dictatorship. Morsi won with just over 50% of the vote and provoked a strong reaction when he tried to assume absolute powers to Islamize the country. The army has taken power.

In the Middle East, more or less brutal military governments have prevented fundamentalists, often in the majority, from imposing Sharia law.

In Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, hero of independence after the First World War, wanted to impose Western values, convinced that secularism and the Europeanization of Turkey were the means to make it a modern country. He organized a republic that elected 13 presidents over 84 years, overseen by armed forces that maintained liberal ideology. In 2014, was elected Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Muslim who graduated from a school of imams, who gradually returned to an Islamic society, put an end to the freedom of the press, put in place an authoritarian government. The urge to establish Islam clashes with Turkey’s desire to join the European Union, but even decades of secularism have failed to eliminate the majority’s desire to return to mainstream society.

Mohammad Reza Pahleví was Emperor of Iran from 1941 to February 1979. His idea was similar to that of Ataturk, he wanted to impose Western values. The “King of kings” and “Luz de los Arios” led a policy of modernization: expropriation of large estates, female suffrage, the so-called “white revolution”. The reforms affected a small part of the population and produced discontent in the small towns and in the rural sector, the most religious of the country. His advisor was Samuel Huntington, professor at Harvard University, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Reconfiguration of the World Order.

At the end of 1978, the uprising against the government spreads, the Shah flees the country and a government of religious is set up, chaired by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeiní, which continues until now. Although officially Iran is a republic, it is in reality a theocracy, all power belongs to Iman, elected by an Assembly of Experts on the sacred texts.

It is wrong that Islam is ruled by men who subdue women

The Iranian government is trying to export its model with direct political interventions in Lebanon and the activities of its terrorist arm Hezbollah. They have a belligerent attitude because they believe that the end of the world is near, and in this process they will have a central role commanded by the Hidden Mahdi and Jesus, who will order the death of all Jews and Christians who will not convert. not to Twelfth Shiism.

Women. There is in the West the idea that Islam is ruled by men who oppress the women to whom they are subjected. It’s wrong. When the Shah fell, the most dangerous thing was the groups of women dressed in black burkas who roamed the streets looking for Westerners to kill them.

The vast majority of women in these countries support Islamic movements, although many Westerners are angered by the provisions of Sharia law that violate human rights. Personally, I have always stood up for women in these troubled countries, collecting signatures and sending petitions to try to stop the abuse. For the effect, I even used this column.

There are other practices such as ablation, partial or total removal of the female sexual organ to prevent women from experiencing sexual pleasure, which according to the WHO affects between 100 and 140 million girls and women. women in 28 African countries and some in Asia, among which is Iraq. It is a radical version of the thesis of the Council of Trent, in force until a few years ago among us, that female sexual pleasure is a sin.

* Professor at GWU. Member of the Argentine Political Club.