https://www.dhakatribune.com/opinion/op-ed/2021/08/20/op-ed-falling-hu-man-ity

Captured twenty years apart, two viscerally shocking images [SEE
ATTACHMENT] from New York City and Kabul come together to tell one of the
dominant stories of our interlinked and increasingly calamitous 21st
century.

The first person to make that explicit connection was the Twitter user
@qaummunist on August 16, just after hordes of desperate Afghans attempted
to clamber onboard an already moving American C-17 Globemaster transport
aircraft.

The pilots kept going, and as their plane angled into the sky two men were
seen plunging to their deaths (they had probably clung to the wheels).

@aummunist’s real name is Syed Aalim Akhtar. He’s a 25-year-old PhD
candidate in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (with
roots in Amroha, in Uttar Pradesh).

Asked how he came to that brilliant insight in the veritable blink of an
eye, Akhtar told me “I have worked on 9/11 literature as part of my
research, focussed particularly on the visuality associated with the World
Trade Centre towers.” Thus, when he saw the footage from Kabul, “the
connection was immediate.”

In the moment, Akhtar posted an image of the men plummeting from the
American plane next to Richard Drew’s famous “Falling Man” photograph from
the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, explaining that “the two visuals
[are] connected in history, violence, politics.”

Akhtar added further thoughts (I have retained his no-capitals syntax) -
“there is something very eerie in these two images in the way in which they
connect through a ‘free fall’. both were invisible to the naked eye, except
as indistinguishable dots. they gained human recognition only when they
crashed against the ground with a loud thud.”

Finally, “modernity’s obsession with speed attains its climax in new york
and kabul. one feels like an endless repetition of another – skies,
heights, free falls, and indistinguishable dots of humanity. the modern
maxim of one who gains speed gains territory is overturned.”

There’s another aspect to what happened. In 2011, the “Falling Man” images
were widely understood as disrespectful. The hometown New York Times
published one on September 12, and never again. The photographs became not
exactly forbidden, but generally off-limits. No such compunctions will
remain after Kabul.

Of course, that is not the only culture shift after the American haste to
lift-off from Afghanistan, leaving billions of dollars in armaments, and
20,000 of their own citizens to the custody of the Taliban.

Also laid bare is the rotten core of western adventurism in Afghanistan,
from the pipelines of cash that built up the mujahideen who eventually
became the Taliban, to the absurdly named Operation Enduring Freedom,
launched precisely 20 years ago in August 2011.

Back then, a huge range of countries gathered to abet the American bombing
campaign (it took much longer to put troops on the ground). Bangladesh
rallied: no troops, but use of its ports and airports. India offered
equipment (helicopters to the Northern Alliance), intelligence and
infrastructure.

At that time, George W. Bush declared, “We are supported by the collective
will of the world. We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the
freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from
fear. We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will
not fail.”

While that notably empty suit is often correctly derided as the worst
American president, even below the boorishly incompetent Donald Trump, it
was the prematurely sainted Joe Biden who dropped the other shoe this week.

 “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation
building,” he said. “It was never supposed to be creating a unified,
centralized democracy. We gave them every chance to determine their own
future.  What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that
future.”

This is extraordinarily cynical doublespeak, coming from an administration
that – along with its predecessors – propped up an obviously untenable and
atrociously corrupt regime. Even its own President wouldn’t fight for it,
as we now know, after Ashraf Ghani showed up in the UAE (allegedly toting
$169 million dollars in purloined state funds).

Here, it’s vital to pay attention to commentators like America’s own Howard
French, the veteran foreign correspondent and author, whose August 18
analysis in *World Politics Review* is entitled “Afghanistan is a Lesson in
Humility.”

French says “the narrative about the Afghans being unwilling to fight is
wrong. During their two decades of combat in cooperation with the United
States, Afghan security forces lost 60,000 men, an order of magnitude
greater than the death toll among allied Western forces.” Instead, this
failure “was about the rottenness of Afghan elites, and their utter
disconnectedness from the lives of ordinary people.”

With the experience of decades covering interventionist escapades, French
notes, “this is a problem seen almost everywhere the West has sought to
prop up regimes first and foremost—no matter what Western leaders declare
publicly about human rights and other lofty virtues—to shield the West
itself from perceived dangers of one kind or another.”

In this way, “moral hazard accumulates as the job of those in government
becomes more and more about maintaining their privilege, rank and
opportunities for graft. The ordinary men and women who must put their
lives on the line [eventually] ask themselves, “Why should I die for this
lot of thieves?”

“The end always comes quickly when moral hazard has been piled so high, and
so it was in Afghanistan,” says French.

The final conclusion: “Old-fashioned imperialism, where faraway powers can
prop up client states and help them gin up legitimacy through budgetary
largesse and military training, has been in its death agonies for years. In
the end, Afghanistan is going to have to be ruled by Afghans, and not
according to the preferences of others…It almost certainly will not be
pretty, and indeed may be painful, most of all perhaps for the women and
girls of the country. But the old models don’t work anymore, if they ever
did, and there is simply no avoiding this fact.”

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