“西贡时刻”再现让人心痛！20年过去，美国给阿富汗留下了什么？

导读 

8月15日上午，塔利班进入阿富汗首都喀布尔。美国紧急撤离大使馆工作人员，这场景让人想起越南战争结束前夕，美方从西贡仓皇撤离的场面。有媒体将这次美军从喀布尔的撤离比作新版“西贡时刻”。

这20年里，在阿富汗传播美式民主的美国，究竟给阿富汗带去了什么？

After fighting the "longest war" in its history, the US is now witnessing a complete failure in Afghanistan, a country also known as "the Graveyard of Empires," which analysts have said is a "page of shame" that the US has written for itself.

On August 15th, Taliban forces entered the capital of Kabul and took control of the presidential palace while Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, fled the country. This came 10 days after the Taliban launched a full-scale military offensive and less than a month before the deadline that US President Joe Biden had set for all US troops to withdraw from Afghanistan. 

On Sep 11, 2001, the World Trade Center terror attacks in New York orchestrated by Al-Qaeda shook the US. In a bid to destroy Al-Qaeda and under the guise of bolstering local and global security, the US initiated the war in Afghanistan on Oct 7, 2001.

The US quickly occupied Kabul and dismantled the Taliban regime. But it did not stop its operation. Instead, it increased military presence in Afghanistan in 2010. At its peak, there were 100,000 American troops garrisoned in Afghanistan.

▲ American soldiers wait to board helicopters at Kandahar airbase ahead of an operation in Afghanistan on 19 May, 2003. Photo/AFP

The US intended to continue to use military force to spread American democracy in Afghanistan and established a pro-American government. The Taliban became military forces that continued to compete with the US military.

In response to the Taliban's fickle tactics, the US military resorted to airstrikes in an attempt to blow up Taliban positions. Yet, Afghan villages and houses had been destroyed and people were struggling to live.

Afghanistan, once had a "golden decade" of rapid economic development, moved away from religion and secularization, and girls had the right to go to school and work without having to wear the traditional chador (headscarf). During the time, the country's cosmopolitan capital was called the "Paris of Central Asia." But now, because of decades of war, Afghan has been run into ruins.

What exactly did the US military bring to Afghan?

Since entering Afghanistan, US troops have caused more than 30,000 civilian deaths, injured more than 60,000 and turned 11 million people into refugees.

According to official figures, just in 2019, at least 6,825 drone strikes took place in Afghanistan, and 7,423 bombs and other munitions were dropped on the land, an average of 20 bombs a day. With US bombs blasting all around, peace and stability have long been a goal far beyond the reach of ordinary Afghans.

The 20-year-long US war in Afghanistan abounds with heartrending tragedies of ordinary Afghan families. One of them was a deadly US airstrike on an Afghan hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in 2015. Though around 40 civilians were killed in what the MSF called "a war crime," the Pentagon downplayed the severity of its felony by claiming that the deadly attack was "caused primarily by human error."

▲ Photo/ IC

The "Afghan Girl" picture was taken by Steve McCurry in 1984 in a refugee camp near Peshawar, when Sharbat Gula was studying in a tent school. Published in 1985 in the National Geographic magazine, it became one of the most recognizable magazine covers ever printed.

▲ Photo Credit to Steve McCurry

Sharbat Gula was a child living with her family in the Kot district of eastern Nangarhar province when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in 1979. "There was war between Russians and Afghanistan — that is why we left. A lot of damage/destruction was done.", said Sharbat Gula.

Her mother died of appendicitis in the village when she was eight. Like hundreds of thousands of other Afghans, her family includes her father, four sisters and one brother who migrated to Pakistan and started living in a tent in a refugee camp called Kacha Garahi, on the outskirts of Peshawar. She was married at 13. But her husband, Rahmat Gul, was later diagnosed with hepatitis C and died in 2012. Her eldest daughter also died of hepatitis in 2014 at age 22, leaving a two-month-old daughter.

Because of the war, there are thousands of children like this in Afghanistan. Children in Afghan are not only lose their freedom, but also have to face bloody death at an early age.

On March 5, 2020, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled that its prosecutor could open an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Afghan war since May 2003, including those committed by members of the US armed forces and the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), such as alleged attacks against hospitals and other non-military targets, civilian casualties by drones, abuse of prisoners and torture.

In a move typical of US hegemony and bullying, Washington then blocked the financial assets of certain ICC staff and imposed visa restrictions on them and their immediate family members as retaliation.

To justify Washington's economic and legal offensive, then US Attorney General William Barr claimed that the measures "are an important first step in holding the ICC accountable for exceeding its mandate and violating the sovereignty of the United States."

The tragic irony is that the United States, a country that least respects the sovereignty of other states, wanted to use sovereignty as a pretext to block an independent investigation by the ICC into its war crimes.

Two decades ago, the United States roared into Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism. If they could have limited their focus on the claimed target, the atrocities this Asian nation has suffered from over the decades might not have been that horrifying. And yet Washington's imperial hubris has overwhelmed its rationality, and the Afghan people have paid a monumental price.

"The United States exposed Afghans to prolonged harm in order to defend America from another terrorist attack," Carter Malkasian, a historian who once served as a senior advisor to the US military commander in Afghanistan, wrote in his book The American War in Afghanistan.

The United States may have chosen to leave on its own terms, yet the unspeakable atrocities it has perpetrated against the country and its people will be indelibly imprinted on the mind of people across the world.

编辑：商桢

实习生：陈一驰

参考来源：Xinhua, Insight, CCTV News, VOA, BBC, CNN, Global Times

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