Why The Wars On Terror, Drugs And Migration Never Succeed

 

War rhetoric is everywhere in our volatile politics: from Ukraine to the resurrection of the war on terror in Gaza, from the ‘wars’ on human smugglers, drugs and crime, through to more metaphorical culture wars, ‘war on motorists’, on a virus – even on climate change. Keir Starmer accuses Rishi Sunak of prosecuting a ‘one-man war on reality’ while ‘anti-woke’ campaigners decry a war on Christmas. Some of these wars are spurious (last time we looked, Christmas is still happening). Others are all too real.

What’s clear is that war rhetoric is attractive either to rally one’s troops or to smear one’s opponents. No surprise: war mobilises. If a politician were to proclaim ‘a mild push on climate change’ or ‘a moderately important attempt to curtail migration,’ they’d get few plaudits from the ranks. But, as my colleague Ruben Andersson and I found in our book Wreckonomics, our addiction to waging (or announcing) war on everything has brought underhand benefits for politicians and massive problems for the rest of us.

For a start, politicians frequently use the spectacle of war to direct attention away from their deeper failures. Israel’s Gaza onslaught, after major security failings, may be a notable example. In the more metaphorical war on smugglers, we might think of Sunak’s renewed noises over small boats in face of record immigration figures. Diversionary tactics abound. Just two weeks after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld suggested: ‘Look, as part of the war on terrorism, should we be getting something going in another area, other than Afghanistan, so that success or failure and progress isn’t measured just by Afghanistan?’ The Iraq invasion followed, with New Labour support. Amid the subsequent quagmire, one former Foreign Office worker told me of pressure to ensure things were seen to be working in Afghanistan so as to provide a distraction from things going so badly in Iraq.

Another problem rears its head here: war – whether in rhetoric or practice – tends to create more enemies. When politicians sought to frame measures against Covid-19 as a just war of sorts, opponents reacted and belligerence grew. As for real war, figures from the Global Terrorism Index show that in the context of the multi-trillion dollar global war on terror, the number of terrorist attacks rose rapidly: from around 3,300 in 2000 to almost 30,000 by 2015. Israel would do well to heed the warning.

War creates rich opportunities for those who want to game it for purposes of their own. The classic case is Vietnam, where American General William Corson observed that the South Vietnamese government’s power was ‘based on the US presence, and since that in turn is based on the level of violence it is to their advantage to orchestrate the war at the appropriate level.’ More recently, regimes from Syria to Sri Lanka and China have used the idea of a ‘war on terror’ as convenient cover for repressing their own populations. Meanwhile, from Gaddafi’s Libya to Turkey and Niger, ‘partner states’ have been able to use the threat of mass migration to leverage aid money and to carve out immunity for repression.

To these perverse incentives, we can add one more: the ease with which its costs can be exported to others. In 1935, another US general, Smedley Butler, denounced war as a racket ‘in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.’ Consider the war on drugs, which in the words of one report, has generated ‘mass incarceration in the US, highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilisation in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, an HIV epidemic in Russia, an acute global shortage of pain medication and the propagation of systematic human rights abuses around the world.’ And all this at huge expense to the public purse.

War ushers in a self-righteousness that quashes dissent and constrains debate over its real costs. For years, the staggering failure in Afghanistan and Iraq was effectively hidden away. ‘We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,’ admitted Douglas Lute, the Afghan war czar under the Bush and Obama administrations. For too long, no one dared call the emperor naked while he was leading his troops into battle. We see a similar pattern in rhetorical wars too – including in the fight against Covid-19 via lockdowns, whose highly unequal distribution of costs worldwide was frequently seen as beyond the scope of civilised discussion. ‘Net zero’ risks reproducing this, fuelling an unsavoury politics of grievance. Both those on the left and right would do well to dial down their righteousness and listen.

More insidious than the quashing of dissent is the manipulation of the information environment that war invites. In the war on terror, beating Isis became a ‘win’ – even though Isis owed its existence to the war itself. In the war on drugs, policymakers reel off metrics on narcotics intercepted and smugglers arrested, but the trade keeps growing. At the borders, each crackdown (at Calais, in the Mediterranean) promises a political pay-off but also stores up future trouble (the small boats, the Atlantic crossing). When wars are declared, politicians need to point so a ‘win’, but all too often this means we frequently end up in a hall of mirrors where underlying problems are renewed and where failure becomes a peculiar kind of success.

In all the war talk lurks the danger, too, of crying wolf. When a real war happens, whether in Ukraine or the Middle East, we may not fully recognise it for what it is — not least when it comes to the dangers of escalation and the quashing of dissent.

We must wean ourselves off the war fix. By opening our eyes to the real costs and ill-gotten benefits from both rhetorical and real wars, we have a chance to ditch the addiction. That will help us to focus on the more peaceful solutions that only emerge when dissent and debate are allowed a proper place in politics. 

Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything, by Ruben Andersson and David Keen, is out now

Why are politicians fixated with declaring war? By David Keen. The Spectator December 22, 2023. 

Just like the war on drugs and the war on terror, efforts at stopping population movement by force often just fuel the problem. But for many claiming to confront the perceived threat, that suits all too well

Look at the business of tackling the migration crisis in Europe, and you will find evidence not of some one-off failure to plan ahead, or a policy initiative gone wrong through unexpected circumstances. Rather, you face something akin to a complex crime scene where the damage, the ostensible “mistakes”, and the cover-ups have all been systematic. The perverse outcomes of the war on smuggling – including thousands of border deaths, escalating political brinkmanship and the professionalisation of the human smuggling business itself – are more than a blip or an anomaly. When policies persistently fail, we need to look not only at “what went wrong” but also at “what went right”– and at who is benefiting from the wreckage.

 The habit of waging “war” on everything has spread from the early days of the war on communism and the war on drugs to “fights” against crime, terrorism, irregular migration and many more complex political problems. These wars never seem to be won and often have disastrous results, yet politicians continue to declare them. What keeps such disastrous interventions and policies ticking over? What renders them acceptable? Why do they get reinvented from one era to another? And why do we never seem to learn? Using our backgrounds in anthropology (Ruben Andersson) and history/sociology (David Keen), over recent years, we have sought to get to the bottom of these questions. Nowhere illustrates the failure of “the war on everything” approach better than the fight against migration.

In 2010, when Ruben first arrived in Senegal to study migration to Europe, he was struck by something people kept telling him. Four years earlier, in one of Europe’s earlier “migration crises”, 30,000 west-African migrants had arrived at the Spanish Canary Islands in wooden fishing boats, sparking a large-scale deportation campaign. On the outskirts of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, one of those deported from the Canaries told Ruben that he was, as an anthropologist studying migration, part of a system that was profiting from the migrants’ misery. “There’s lots of money in illegal migration,” said the deportee, pointing out, on long walks through his seaside neighbourhood, all those who fed off this system: academics, journalists, NGOs and European and Senegalese maritime forces stationed just beyond this fishing community.

At the time, the word on the street was that Senegalese politicians, both locally and nationally, were using Spanish aid money – meant to ensure Senegal’s collaboration in deportations and border patrols – for their own private or political gain. In coming years, the pattern would be replicated as major partners in European immigration control – such as Libya, Turkey and Sudan – leveraged their promised cooperation, not just for a windfall of aid, but also for wider strategic and economic ends.

Seeing this system in action, we developed an analysis of the political economy of war and of security operations such as deportation and border patrols – asking the old question “Cui bono” (Who gains?), as well as “In whose wider interests are the operations staged?” There was an intriguing, if disturbing, challenge of joining the dots between various disastrous interventions, from the wars on drugs and smugglers to the war on terror, where we had observed a very similar pattern. In a variety of war-like interventions, regional powers have been gaming ostensible attempts to eliminate a perceived threat, carving out impunity and making a profit. At the same time, pursuing these various wars and fights has routinely fuelled – or simply displaced – the problem. For a wide range of actors who claim to confront the perceived threat, things keep going wrong in the right way.

Escalating the fights, escalating the demands

One of the most important gamers was Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi. By the early 2000s, he had already discovered that he sat on a prize possession. Amid the international arms embargo, the Brotherly Leader had turned his eyes to his African neighbours: sleeping in a great Bedouin tent in New York before the UN general assembly was all of a piece with his newfound role as chief spokesperson for downtrodden African nations breaking free from old colonial shackles. He had established close business links with states in the Sahel and invited African workers into Libya’s booming economy.

 As Italy and its northern neighbours anxiously began considering the Mediterranean for signs of migrant boats, however, Gaddafi started seeing his country’s African workers as a double asset. On the one hand, workers could still be exploited; on the other, they could be weaponised. By 2008, a Friendship Treaty had been struck between Gaddafi and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, which was worth $5bn over 20 years. Supposedly aimed at addressing colonial wrongs, it smoothed the path for outsourced border patrols in the central Mediterranean. Even so, Gaddafi, who had by now fully grown into Reagan’s caricature of him as the “mad dog of the Middle East”, escalated the rhetoric and threatened that Europe would “turn black” unless more favours were forthcoming. And come they did: Libya emerged from the international cold thanks in no small part to Gaddafi’s migration manoeuvres. He also succeeded in presenting himself as someone who could help in the “war on terror” – not least because of his role in stirring up terror.

Then came war. Amid the Arab spring, Nato and assorted Middle Eastern countries intervened militarily in the scramble for power in Libya. The violent removal of Gaddafi and the conflict that followed led to a cascade of displacement and migration; it also escalated the gaming and brinkmanship. Nato missiles had ended his previously cosy relationship with European leaders, but Gaddafi did not give up on his threats and cajoling in the dying days of his regime – quite the opposite. Europe would be “invaded” by migrants, he said, unless Nato backed down; his troops tried to make good on his threat, forcing African workers to board unseaworthy vessels at gunpoint.

In the following years, assorted warlords have kept up this tradition by simultaneously combating and facilitating migration, taking handsome rewards while threatening Europe with further “invasions”. In one notable episode, one militia leader in the north-western Libyan city of Zawiya, known as Al Bija, was found by journalists to be managing the smuggling market by taking a substantial cut from any departing boats before promptly “rescuing” those who had not paid, towing them back to land and imprisoning them in brutal detention centres run by his own tribe. The double game of migration control – extracting cash and impunity by issuing threats, while simultaneously offering to remedy them – was, by the time of Libya’s conflict, a high-stakes scramble for profit and power.

Gaming Europe’s migration fixation

The stakes were to rise higher still. In 2015, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was in a tight spot: he had called snap elections and was under siege from all sides. But Erdoğan held the trump card: migration. Though the details were to remain murky, by spring 2016 it was becoming clear that threatening to turn on the tap of onward migration was an important tactic for the Turkish leadership. (Questions still remain over Russia’s role in fomenting the crisis as part of its Syria manoeuvres.) The 2015-16 border crisis would strengthen Erdoğan’s grip on power as he extracted promises from the EU – only partially met, but that did not particularly matter for short-term electoral purposes – on visa-free travel for Turkish citizens and billions of euros of financial support for Turkey’s refugee operations.

Selling yourself as an unreliable bulwark against migration had by 2015 become big business. “Weapons of mass migration” is how one scholar, Kelly Greenhill, has labelled this use of migrants as a geopolitical tool. Whatever we call this gaming of migration and forced displacement, it is a remarkably effective way for less powerful states to exert pressure on their stronger counterparts. One further example comes from Morocco, which in 2022 managed finally to shift Spain’s policy on occupied Western Sahara in its favour in exchange for further migration enforcement – halting, at least temporarily, the brinkmanship that had fomented politically motivated “border crises” at the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, as well as in the strait of Gibraltar, over previous decades. The costs of this bargaining were regularly borne by migrants; for instance, in June 2022 at least 37 migrants died between the Spanish and Moroccan fences at Melilla, where they had been trapped and teargassed in a security operation subsequently covered up by both sides.

In her study, Greenhill argues that certain features of liberal democracies – including respect for rights and open democratic debate – make them particularly vulnerable to being played. However, we have seen in Libya and Turkey how the illiberal tendency of treating migration as a threat has been a key part of the game. Once fighting migration has come to be seen as a paramount political objective in destination states, and once huge resources are being spent on this endeavour, buffer states will spot vulnerabilities and opportunities to play on this perceived existential threat, selectively closing and opening the gates.

UNHCR figures as of 2023 confirm a broader trend: 83% of refugees worldwide are hosted by low- and middle-income countries, and 72% by countries neighbouring conflict zones. Turkey, topping the list of global refugee hosts, can reasonably argue that it has done its “fair share” in hosting more than 3.6 million refugees, mostly from neighbouring Syria. When larger refugee hosts leverage human displacement, they are using the “weapons of the weak”, to use anthropologist James Scott’s term, against a more powerful counterpart. While border security has spectacularly failed to address international migration (and has generated a raft of destructive consequences), it has nevertheless “succeeded” in keeping refugees away from the protection that might have been provided by the richest states, at least for some time. Yet this is far from the only shortsighted gain for destination states. Another comes from the potent politics of distraction and drama that border control provides.

The burgeoning business of border security

It is worth reflecting on how swiftly borders became bulwarks against unwanted migration. The end of the cold war once promised, to optimistic liberal thinkers, a borderless world; instead, it gifted us an increasingly globalised border business. Not only are more and more partner states being enrolled in border security, but many countries are also instigating their own border security fixations. Barriers are today separating neighbours not just in the west but far beyond. While there were 15 walls at nation-state borders around the world at the end of the cold war, the total had risen to more than 70 barely three decades later. Unlike older border fortifications, the new ones are not built to keep state enemies away (or to keep citizens in, as in the case of the Berlin Wall): they are aimed at keeping people out.

Calls for “security” and “border protection” justify not just the building of walls but also a wider architecture of control, separation and surveillance at national borders, and well beyond them. Drones have been repurposed from the “war on terror” for border surveillance in the US and the Mediterranean; complex offshore detention and sea patrolling agreements have been rolled out from Australia to the Atlantic; advanced radar equipment and satellite surveillance have proven a boon for Europe’s defence industry; and in the increasing number of border security “expos”, security firms have presented their customers with ever more intrusive technologies– heartbeat scanners, oxygen detectors, ground sensors, online surveillance – in a market that, according to one estimate, will soon be worth more than $65bn. Meanwhile, the budget of the EU border and coast guard agency, Frontex, shot up from €19m in 2006 to more than €750m by 2022, a year in which it was facing mounting scandal over support for illegal Greek “pushbacks” at sea.

The US, as so often, has led the way in this trend while actively heating the global border security market – with the budget of the US Border Patrol increasing almost tenfold in the past three decades, from $363m in 1993 to nearly $4.9bn by 2021. While these sums are still small relative to military expenditure, the remarkable growth rate of the US Border Patrol’s budget is strongly related to the wider security marketplace, with great scope for synergies, “dual-use” technology, seed funding and more, across civilian policing and military sectors. At the heart of this complex sits the vast Department for Homeland Security bureaucracy.

Besides the escalating border security investments, politicians have put huge amounts of time, money and effort into the complicated business of getting tough on migration – and being seen to get tough.

Yet this has massively backfired on a practical level. Douglas Massey, a leading migration scholar, has found that, since the 1980s, vast expenditure on border security has gone hand in hand with a large growth of undocumented migration within the US.

The reason is remarkably simple: as it became much harder for seasonal migrant workers to circulate back “home”, owing to harsh border controls and barriers, people stayed. So why, if border controls were backfiring so spectacularly, were successive administrations so committed to them?

The political profits of fighting migration

The gap between rhetoric and reality in migration policy has been especially notable when it comes to fighting migration. The political gains from a strong stance on borders are clear, even when politicians fail to achieve the outcomes they seek. Some years ago in the US, the political scientist Peter Andreas described this as a “border game” with various layers: from the spectacle – and distraction – of border enforcement on the political level, to the institutional funding game, through to the cat-and-mouse game at the border itself.

Racism came to play a prominent role here, reflecting a longer history of racial exclusion, fed by a fear-based narrative. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan said undocumented migration was “a threat to national security”, with “terrorists and subversives ... just two days’ driving time” from the Texas border, and communist agents ready “to feed on the anger and frustration of recent Central and South American immigrants”. Massey is among those who have pointed out how, over the decades that followed, a racialised “Latino threat narrative was manufactured and sustained by an expanding set of self-interested actors who benefited from the perpetuation of an immigration crisis”. This new migration pattern also had clear winners within the wider economy, as an undocumented and deportable labour force was even more exploitable than its legal predecessors.

A large part of the incentive to keep escalating the fight, in the US and Europe, concerned the gains to be had from fixating on and fighting illegal migration. Especially in the US, border closures have brought economic gains in rendering the cross-border labour force increasingly exploitable. Meanwhile, the political gains are twofold. On the one hand, a tough nationalist message attracts voters; on the other, it provides a distraction from problems that governments cannot or do not want to solve, including inequality, economic insecurity and environmental catastrophe. Irregular migration by land and sea was a boon for this kind of politics in Europe. Yet the numbers have in general been relatively small, 2015 excluded. Most irregular migration in Europe occurs when people overstay their visas, as the European Commission itself acknowledges, while regular immigration dwarfs land and sea arrivals.

Governments and interior ministries have seen fit, for their own political and institutional reasons, to treat some human movement as a security problem to be solved with force. Instead of looking at the complex drivers of migration – including persistent demand for workers – all politicians had to do was to be seen to address the arrivals. Meanwhile, new actors spotted an opportunity.

How the war on migration feeds the smuggling business

European leaders have been keen to frame their border security efforts as a war on smugglers, especially since 2015, when smugglers (frequently mislabelled as mafia or traffickers) were conveniently assigned the blame for a set of horrific shipwrecks near the Italian and Maltese coasts. Of course, we shouldn’t paint smugglers in a rosy light; theirs is usually a cut-throat business. Yet it is a business that has grown larger and more violent on the back of border enforcement, not just in Europe but worldwide.

In north Africa and the Sahel, the small-scale smuggling of earlier years, often run by migrants themselves, has increasingly given way to organised criminal gangs. In Libya, smugglers have held migrants and refugees hostage and even tortured them until their families pay release fees. The taller the barriers, the more captive your market, as “customers” have nowhere left to turn except into the hands of professional criminal organisations.

We can put this in economic terms, as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in the US are keen to do themselves. In presentations, CBP economists have asserted, like their European counterparts, that the aim of enforcement is to destroy the smugglers’ business model. This involves increasing the cost of smuggling to the point where revenue takes a hit, making it a less attractive business. Yet what this does in practice is favour smuggling economies of scale. A systemic view, if officials had wished to consider it, would tell them that the fight against migration and the war on smugglers would produce more of precisely that which they said they wanted to curtail: more dangerous migration scenarios and stronger criminal smuggling operations.

This is precisely what happened in Libya, after the fall of Gaddafi. As one report noted in 2017, “The coastguard, detention centres and key branches of the fragile Libyan state’s security apparatus are largely run by militias, some deeply involved in the illicit economy,” with these militias “creating a protection market around human smuggling before eventually taking over the business directly”. The political and economic games around European – especially Italian – relationships with the militias have been complex and murky. However, it was becoming clear around this time that external involvement and encouragement were strengthening the power of the militias, who, like many border guards, could play the dual role of poacher and gamekeeper along Libya’s coasts. The strengthening of militias and the ensuing turf battles among them were contributing to Libyan instability.

 In impoverished Mali and Niger, various political leaders have sent clear signals that unless they receive the required political support and economic capital, a migratory crisis will ensue. States such as Morocco and Turkey regularly turn on and off the migratory tap to strengthen their hand in negotiations with the EU. In all these cases, authoritarian leaders, interior ministries, and abusive security forces have been the big winners in the fight against migration – gaining power, recognition and money. Those who have suffered most have been migrants and citizens in these countries, while regional stability has been weakened.

In 2020, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus – despite his regime’s incipient working arrangement with the Frontex border agency – was channelling refugees to a frontier no-man’s-land where Polish guards fought them back. By this stage, EU leaders and the European Commission had cottoned on to what they called the “instrumentalisation” of migration. Their argument, probably quite correct, was that Lukashenko was seeking to destabilise the EU through uncontrollable migration flows. Yet instead of accounting for its own role in the blatant gaming at the borders, the EU used this incident to propose what amounted to pushbacks in cases where migration was being “instrumentalised”.

On the central Mediterranean migration route, it is not only Gaddafi’s successors who have continued to instrumentalise migration. So have Italian politicians, who have used these threats at face value to ramp up anti-migration rhetoric, to rally the voter base, and to put blame on the EU – and human smugglers – for the debacle.

This kind of crisis politics has been accompanied by a growing tendency to shift blame on to rescue initiatives on the open sea, with repeated shipwrecks and deaths as a result. On the southern border of the US, while Mexico has often been less willing to stoke the problem in the way Europe’s neighbours have done, this has in no way dented the political appetite in Washington DC for manipulating border crises and finding new groups to blame. A wide range of wars and fights – whether in relation to migration, terrorism, drugs or crime – has created perverse incentives. One is tempted to say that failure has become the new success.

This is an edited extract from Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything, published by Oxford University Press, 2023.

‘Weapons of mass migration’: how states exploit the failure of migration policies. By Ruben Andersson and David Keen. The Guardian, December 14, 2023. 

Oxford University Press

Oxford Academic

Security is one of the most important and challenging issues in the 21st century. It is the ability to protect and promote the well-being and dignity of people and communities, and to prevent and resolve conflicts and threats. But what does security really mean? And how can we achieve it in a complex and uncertain world? In this article, we will review the book Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything by Ruben Andersson and David Keen, two professors of international development and experts on conflict and security. The book is a critical and provocative analysis of why various wars and security interventions have persisted and prospered despite their disastrous failures and costs, and how we can end the war on everything and create a more peaceful and prosperous world.

If you want to learn more about security and development, and how to challenge and change the destructive policies and practices that fuel the war on everything, you should read this book. It will give you a new and holistic perspective on security and development, and help you find effective and ethical ways to address the complex and interrelated challenges and opportunities that we face in the world.

Recommendation

War is hell, the saying goes. For professors Ruben Andersson and David Keen, the truism evokes a different kind of hellscape. In this insightful analysis, they dissect the “war on everything,” by which they mean misguided fights against problems like terror, illicit drugs and illegal immigration. In every case, the warriors oversimplify the threat, use bogus metrics to measure their progress and then duly claim victory where none exists. Andersson and Keen focus not just on the hypocrisy of political leaders but also on the unintended victims of these wars. You’ll find that their thought-provoking work casts many of society’s issues in a new light.

Take-Aways

“Wreckonomics” is a perverse process by which a misguided policy targets an intractable problem.

Wreckonomics policies consist of five parts that describe the process.

The Cold War set the stage for decades of unwarranted wars.

The War on Terror played on fears while botching the broader mission.

Wreckonomics policies create their own destructive momentum.

The fight against illegal immigration contains echoes of the other wars.

The War on Drugs is the longest of the wreckonomics misadventures.

Four strategies can help make wreckonomics policies less devastating.

 

 

Summary

“Wreckonomics” is a perverse process by which a misguided policy targets an intractable problem.

In recent decades, Western governments have embarked on a variety of well-funded fights against various scourges. There was a War on Drugs and a War on Terror, along with fights against illegal immigration. But the cures proved worse than the diseases. These wars created unintended consequences without fixing the underlying problems. Despite the obvious failures of these wars, politicians keep fighting them and finding new enemies. Indeed, politics in the United States seem to be dominated by a never-ending search for new foes and a demand from the warriors that everyone become more indignant.

“This habit of waging ‘war on everything’ has spread from the early days of the war on Communism and the war on drugs to ‘fights’ against crime, terrorism, migration and many more complex political problems.”

One theme in these wars is that they underestimate the complexity of the challenge at hand. Politicians view themselves as crime scene investigators – they’re looking for the single culprit responsible for the problem. That mindset led to the manhunts for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In wreckonomics, the good guys need one evil actor to blame, even if the underlying issue has many protagonists. In truth, any social issue is multifaceted and difficult to fix.

“One way of summing up this habit of wreck-and-fix is the old saying ‘If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.”

That leads to another common theme: Wreckonomics policies often are championed by right-wing politicians. While conservatives aren’t entirely to blame for wreckonomics policies, the right has specialized in simplifying and weaponizing complicated issues.

Wreckonomics policies consist of five parts that describe the process.

The wreckonomics ethos can be summed up with the acronym WRECK:

W is for “war fix” – Warriors sell the miracle of the kill shot. In every wreckonomics policy, an ill-conceived notion that the targeted threat is simple and can be remedied through force dominates. Hitting the problem with a magic bullet will neutralize the threat, the warriors promise. Wreckonomics also provides a fix in that the misguided actions soon become addictive. Once the war starts, stopping it is nearly impossible.

R is for rigged – Wreckonomics policies are gamed to benefit certain players. In the war on everything, the fix is always in. No one ever comes out and says it, of course, but those crucial players speaking most loudly against the threat at hand are the ones who benefit most from the focus on it.

E is for externalization – Wreckonomics policies are expensive in terms of blood and treasure, but the interventions never hit the powerful as hard as they hit everyone else.

C is for cascade – The first three letters of WRECK set the stage for unexpected, unpredictable results. Just as an avalanche starts small and escalates quickly, the wreckonomics cascade is a result of the unacknowledged complexity of the task at hand. Costs quickly balloon, as do the opportunities for players to further corrupt the process.

K is for “knowledge fix” – Once the war is under way, its proponents set about twisting the truth: Any victories are exaggerated, any setbacks are downplayed. The distortions include overlooking the true costs of the intervention, and ignoring failures and unintended consequences.

The Cold War set the stage for decades of unwarranted wars.

The Cold War wrote the script for the wreckonomics policies that followed. The globe’s two great powers were embroiled in nonshooting wars against the other. Gaming became endemic. In the United States, huge sums flowed to defense contractors. The Soviet Union also ramped up its own armaments industry. Like all wreckonomics policies, the Cold War launched with a real conflict and sincere intentions: Two great powers aimed to spread their divergent ideologies. However, things quickly spiraled. Over the decades, the Cold War turned hot in proxy wars, perhaps most notably in Vietnam, but also in El Salvador, Indonesia and Angola. The specter of colonialism loomed over many of these hot spots, adding complexity to the system. What’s more, the architects of the Cold War lived in Washington, DC, and Moscow, places unburdened with the high body counts that were racked up in shooting wars in the developing world. One US infantry officer wrote the memoir Kill Everything That Moves, a title that summed up how a poor person living in Vietnam experienced the Cold War.

“Seen as a whole, the Cold War involved a very particular – and very skewed – distribution of costs”

As the Cold War sprawled across the globe, propaganda took over. Neither side gave an honest accounting of its victories and defeats; instead, both turned to spin and obfuscation. What’s more, America and the USSR assembled allies who were gaming the Cold War agenda not out of ideological purity but for their own advantage. The end of the Cold War underscored the addictive nature of wreckonomics: Optimists hoped for a “peace dividend” in the 1990s as the huge sums funneled toward arms, soldiers and spies could be redirected to schools and health care. Instead, the United States and Europe continued to spend heavily on their militaries, with the argument that cutting defense budgets amounted to a surrender to global threats.

The War on Terror played on fears while botching the broader mission.

The post-September 11, 2001, fight against global terrorism quickly devolved into a particularly effective version of wreckonomics. A defining feature of this policy was its appeal to emotion, particularly fear. Terror warriors became adept at manipulating public emotions to get what they wanted. The emotional appeal serves as an inoculation against uncomfortable questions – if the war pits good versus evil, then no right-minded person would question how it’s being waged or how widely it’s proliferating. The US War on Terror turned into an all-encompassing effort, as evidenced by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, a bureaucracy that fought not just terror but also drug trafficking and border security.

“In our wars and fights, strong emotions have also effectively been stirred up and manipulated by political and security actors.”

 The Cold War created the prime conditions for the War on Terror that followed. A hot war in Afghanistan sowed the seeds of future insurgency. Then, when the Cold War ended and communism faded as an enemy, terrorism moved into the role. Terrorism didn’t become Public Enemy No. 1 until the 9/11 attacks. Then, the war machine sprang into action, with the United States invading Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Wreckonomics policies create their own destructive momentum.

Neither invasion was clearly supported, but both illustrated a reality of wreckonomics: The wars perpetuate themselves. A clear goal of the 9/11 terrorists was to provoke the United States into a heavy-handed response, which then served as evidence that America really was the iron-fisted power that the terrorists had portrayed all along. Afghanistan and Iraq, meanwhile, saw spikes in terror attacks after US troops arrived, acts that only seemed to reinforce the rationale for the American invasion and ongoing presence. As Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said of George W. Bush, “Iraq was not even close to the center of the War on Terror before the president invaded it.”

“Many of the state actors we have considered – in Washington, Moscow, Damascus and Colombo – can cynically claim their wars have been ‘won’.”

As billions flowed into Afghanistan, the country remained unstable. A task force headed by General David Petraeus estimated $360 million in US aid had wound up in the pockets of the Taliban or Afghani criminals. To the credit of the terror warriors in the United States, one goal has been achieved: No attacks have occurred on US soil since 2001. But to hold up this fact as the only measure of success is to miss the broader failures. These include massive spending and a globally disruptive wave of violence not just in Afghanistan and Iraq but in Syria, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

The fight against illegal immigration contains echoes of the other wars.

For decades, the United States had been trying to stem illegal immigration across the Mexican border. Brazen incursions across the frontier near San Diego in the 1990s led American authorities to build fences, which then pushed migration paths into more remote, hazardous terrain. Similarly, in the 2000s, an influx of illegal migrants into Spain led that country to build more fences. The migrants in turn took even more circuitous and dangerous routes to Europe. In true wreckonomics fashion, developing nations bordering wealthy powers figured out how to make money from their geographic position. Mexico partnered with the United States to crack down on illegal entries through Mexico’s southern border. Mauritania accepted investments from Spain, while Libya partnered up with Italy.

“Libya emerged from the international cold thanks in no small part to Gaddafi’s migration maneuvers.”

For opportunists south of the border, the fight against immigration is a lucrative leverage point. Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi grasped Europe’s fears of African migrants streaming in, and he threatened to allow Europe to “turn black” unless he received compensation. The gambit worked. Libya received billions in European aid. One scholar even labeled the strategy “weapons of mass migration.” As the Arab Spring and the Syrian war spurred a crisis, the wreckonomics playbook was in full force. Conservative policymakers embraced overly simplistic solutions that were doomed to fall short. Meanwhile, shrewd actors in the developing world figured out how to make the wreckonomics policies work for them. In Libya, for instance, a militia leader exacted a toll from each boat heading north. Those who declined to pay would be “rescued” at sea – and the boat’s occupants sent to prison camps. The spoils weren’t just for strongmen. Frontex, Europe’s border patrol agency, saw its annual budget soar, going from less than $22 million in 2006 to more than$750 million by 2022.

The War on Drugs is the longest of the wreckonomics misadventures.

In wreckonomics, the protagonists of the misguided policy invariably focus on the wrong measurements of success. In the Vietnam War, the US military leadership concentrated on body counts. In the drug war, the short-sighted focus is on arrest numbers. In both cases, the putative leaders of the policy initiatives are like gambling addicts pulling the lever over and over on a slot machine that’s rigged against them: They believe they’re on the verge of victory, even as the defeats pile up. In other words, the drug warriors themselves are addicted – not to narcotics but to the never-ending cycle of fighting a losing war. The Philippines provides an especially macabre version of the drug war. In 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte urged his citizens to kill drug addicts. In Duterte’s first six months in office, Amnesty International estimated, his regime killed some 7,000 people for drug offenses. In a bizarre twist, Duterte himself was addicted to fentanyl.

“The incentives of the environment in which the drug warriors operate keep pushing them toward compulsive behavior.”

Duterte upped the ante, claiming he wanted to unleash a holocaust that would kill millions of addicts. He paid bounties to police officers who murdered drug users. In a bromance between strongmen, US president Donald Trump praised Duterte’s “unbelievable job.” Duterte’s simplistic, brutal fight took a page from the early days of the drug war in the United States. Policymakers and law enforcement made no effort to understand why some people became addicted or why others entered the drug trade. Instead, they focused on mass arrests and heavy-handed tactics, often racially tinged. It was Richard Nixon who coined the phrase “War on Drugs” in 1971, a thinly disguised jab at his predecessor Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. A decade later, Ronald Reagan doubled down. The result was soaring levels of incarceration, particularly for Black Americans. The uneven penalties for crack cocaine, seen as a drug favored by Black users, were clearly racist.

Four strategies can help make wreckonomics policies less devastating.

The wars on everything are costly. Here’s how to mitigate the damage:

Encourage dissent – A society on a war footing has a clear enemy, and no space for dialogue nor room for debate. But in the war on everything, the enemy is never clear-cut. That’s why it’s crucial that warriors make way for dissenting voices. Policy debates shouldn’t be stifled by an environment that mimics martial law.

Honestly assess the true costs – Those who fight wars on everything relish confusion and obfuscation. The “hall-of-mirrors” effect makes it difficult to tell how the war is progressing. To combat this syndrome, societies need robust and honest analyses of who’s really winning and losing in any given war.

Broaden the inputs – In Colombia, policymakers have shifted that nation’s costly war on drugs only after decades of experience and a willingness to listen to various voices, ranging from drug users and coca producers to academics and intellectuals. Groupthink and willful ignorance are part of wreckonomics; bipartisan solutions are a way to create “coalitions against complicity.”

Acknowledge complexity – As part of its rhetoric, every misguided policy war boils down the enemy to one overly simplistic factor. Never mind that drug addiction and mass migration are complicated, systemic issues. The warriors want to make it simple and then ignore every factor outside their narrow view.

About the Authors

Ruben Andersson is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of No Go World and Illegality, Inc. David Keen is a professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Benefits of Famine and Useful Enemies.

Genres

Nonfiction, Politics, International Relations, Security, Development, Sociology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Ethics

Review

The book Wreckonomics is a critical and provocative analysis of why various wars and security interventions have persisted and prospered despite their disastrous failures and costs. The authors, Ruben Andersson and David Keen, are both professors of international development and experts on conflict and security.

They examine four cases of long-running and futile wars and fights: the Cold War, the war on terror, the fight against migration, and the war on drugs and crime. They argue that these wars and fights are not only ineffective and harmful, but also profitable and advantageous for various actors and interests, such as politicians, corporations, media, NGOs, and even criminals and terrorists.

They show how these actors and interests have exploited and manipulated the fears, emotions, and incentives of the public and the policymakers, and have created a system of feedback loops, distortions, and games that sustain and justify the wars and fights.

They also show how these wars and fights have eroded the values and principles of democracy, human rights, and justice, and have undermined the prospects of peace and development. They call for a radical change in the way we think and act about security, and propose a four-step approach to end the war on everything: 1) recognizing the costs and benefits of the wars and fights, 2) breaking the cycles of fixation and gaming, 3) creating space for dissent and dialogue, and 4) building alternative coalitions and solutions.

Wreckonomics is an insightful and compelling book that covers a wide range of topics related to security and development. The authors write in a clear and engaging style, using anecdotes, examples, and metaphors to illustrate their points and make them relevant and relatable to the reader. They also write in a balanced and nuanced manner, acknowledging the complexity and diversity of security and development issues, and avoiding simplistic or prescriptive solutions.

 The book is well-organized and well-researched, with references, notes, and a glossary at the end. The book is not only a valuable and authoritative source of information, but also a motivating and empowering story of how we can challenge and change the destructive policies and practices that fuel the war on everything.

The book is suitable for anyone who is interested in learning more about security and development, whether they are students, professionals, or curious readers. The book is also a useful resource for anyone who wants to understand the broader social and economic issues and trends that affect and shape security and development.

 

Summary: Wreckonomics: Why It’s Time to End the War on Everything by Ruben Andersson and David Keen. By Alex Lim. Paminy December 2, 2023. 

Wreckonomics, a study by two academics, argues that vested interests need ‘forever wars’. That may be true, but is there a solution?

Almost five years ago, it was reported that, according to some metrics, the United States of America had been at peace for only 17 years since 1776. It had thus, at that point, been at war for 93.5 per cent of its existence. What constitutes war – whether there must be nation-states on opposing sides; whether it includes covert or non-military operations – has long been a source of debate, but perpetual war is today the reality. One sobering indicator is the fact that, for several years now, a child born on September 11 2001 has been eligible to enlist in the “war on terror” that ensued. The latter is one of many ill-defined and catastrophic wars being waged in perpetuity around the world.

The human and financial cost of these wars, which are not limited to armed conflicts, is the subject of a new book by Ruben Andersson, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford, and David Keen, a professor of conflict studies at the London School of Economics. Wreckonomics is a deeply-researched and wide-ranging account of how, despite manifest failings, the wars on terror, drugs and migration are entrenched in Western policy as a kind of perma-crisis for which its principal architects are never held responsible.

The invasion of Afghanistan by the United States, where the war on terror and the war on drugs have converged, was a failure on a remarkable scale. The authors steadfastly demonstrate how the war on terror has done nothing but foment what it ostensibly sought to combat: the number of global terrorist attacks ballooned from a reported total of 3,300 so far in 2000 to almost 30,000 by 2015 – despite the spending of nearly $8 trillion dollars between 2001 and 2021.

Central to Wreckonomics is the question of identifying exactly who benefits from these wars going poorly. Beyond arms manufacturers wanting orders and bellicose senators wanting publicity, this includes aid groups and local authorities, whose under-scrutinised flow of funding depends on conflict and instability. To stay with Afghanistan, Andersson and Keen point, in relation to the war on drugs, to the example of poppy-growing areas under the protection of local warlords, in which the job of police chief could be sold for $100,000 despite paying $60 a month. If you then consider a recent UN report stating that since the Taliban declared a drug ban in April 2022, opium cultivation in Afghanistan has declined by 95 per cent, you’re left with two equally damning conclusions: either the US-led intervention into the drug trade was ineffectual, or it was never a true priority.

Time and again, this pattern repeats around the world, wherever local governments are disincentivised from bringing conflict to an end. In Mali and Sudan, foreign aid is tied to fighting Islamic insurgents, who are in fact working in concert with the military to prolong the discord and keep the money flowing. Through the example of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the authors show that even when a conflict ends, the spending may not: rather than demobilising, the army recruited 50,000 more soldiers, in large part to protect a system of kickbacks from arms contracts.

The Covid-19 pandemic – another “battle” the world had to win – provides a telling counterpoint. As early as May 2020, the IMF estimated that $9 trillion worldwide had been allocated to the fight. But as we enter the northern winter of 2023, governments have long since lost their appetite for spending in this area. One of the conditions of perpetual war, suggest Andersson and Keen, is that its active theatres, the locales where the death and turmoil are most keenly felt, must be at a remove from the nation waging them. Think of Turkey and Mauritania as chosen bulwarks against migration to Europe. By contrast, it was impossible to outsource the suffering of Covid-19 – which created a real desire to bring that crisis to an end.

Wreckonomics’s desire to present its subject as systematic and somewhat cyclical does, at times, hit a limit. For instance, the recent series of coups in west African nations would have benefited from a more nuanced, regional-specific approach. While it’s true, per the authors, that in some of those nations, there has been a change in leadership rather than a change in regime, in the likes of Burkina Faso, led by 35-year-old firebrand Ibrahim Traoré, something more radical may be afoot.

Andersson and Keen close a little quixotically, suggesting some steps towards ending the state of affairs they bemoan. They point to the need for strong dissenting voices, dialogue, and proper cost-and-benefit analyses before actors engage in new wars; they call for coalitions against the kind of complicity that makes war profitable, and stress the need to “unfix” the issues that originate them: overly simplistic (and often false) understandings of conflict that become the fixed terms of debate. It’s hard to disagree with any of these proposals – though it’ll remain much harder, you feel, to have such a dialogue over the roar of exploding bombs.

Why the wars on terror, drugs and migration may never succeed. By Samuel Rutter. The Telegraph, December 1, 2023.

Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation

 

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: A lot of nonsense about Afghanistan is being written in Britain and the United States. Most of this nonsense hides a number of important truths.

 
First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.
 
Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.
 
Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.
 
Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.
 
Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.
 
Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.
 
This article explains these points. Because this a short piece, we assert more than we prove. But we have written a great deal about gender, politics and war in Afghanistan since we did fieldwork there as anthropologists almost fifty years ago. We give links to much of this work at the end of this article, so you can explore our arguments in more detail.[1]
 
A military victory
 
This is a military and political victory for the Taliban. It is a military victory because the Taliban have won the war. For at least two years the Afghan government forces – the national army and the police – have been losing more people dead and wounded each month than they are recruiting. So those forces are shrinking.
 
Over the last ten years the Taliban have been taking control of more and more villages and some towns. In the last twelve days they have taken all the cities.
 
This was not a lightning advance through the cities and then on to Kabul. The people who took each city had long been in the vicinity, in the villages, waiting for the moment. Crucially, across the north the Taliban had been steadily recruiting Tajiks, Uzbeks and others.
 
This is also a political victory for the Taliban. No guerilla insurgency on earth can win such victories without popular support.
 
But perhaps support is not the right word. It is more that Afghans have had to choose sides. And more of the Afghan people have chosen to side with the Taliban than have chosen the American occupiers. Not all of them, just more of them.
 
More Afghans have also chosen to side with the Taliban than with the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani. Again, not all of them, but more than support Ghani. And more Afghans have chosen to side with the Taliban than with the old warlords. The defeat of Dostum in Sheberghan and Ismail Khan in Herat is stunning evidence of that.
 
The Taliban of 2001 were overwhelmingly Pushtuns, and their politics was Pushtun chauvinist. In 2021 Taliban fighters of many ethnicities have taken power in Uzbek and Tajik dominated areas.
 
The important exception is the Hazara dominated areas in the central mountains. We come back to this exception.
 
Of course, not all Afghans have chosen to side with the Taliban. This is a war against foreign invaders, but it is also a civil war. Many have fought for the Americans, the government or the warlords. Many more have made compromises with both sides to survive. And many others were not sure which side to take and are waiting with different mixtures of fear and hope to see what will happen.
 
Because this is a military defeat for American power, calls for Biden to do this or that are simply silly. If American troops had remained in Afghanistan, they would have had to surrender or die. This would be a even worse humiliation for American power than the current debacle. Biden, like Trump before him, was out of options.
 
Why so many Afghans chose the Taliban
 
The fact that more people have chosen the Taliban does not mean that most Afghans necessarily support the Taliban. It means that given the limited choices available, that is the choice they have made. Why?
 
The short answer is that the Taliban are the only important political organization fighting the American occupation, and most Afghans have come to hate that occupation.
 
It was not always thus. The US first sent bomber planes and a few troops to Afghanistan a month after 9/11. The US was supported by the forces of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of non-Pushtun warlords in the north of the country. But the soldiers and leaders of the Alliance were not actually prepared to fight alongside the Americans. Given the long history of Afghan resistance to foreign invasion, most recently to the Russian occupation from 1980 to 1987, that would just be too shameful.
 
On the other side, though, almost no one was prepared to fight to defend the Taliban government then in power. The troops of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban faced each other in a phony war. Then the US, the British and their foreign allies began to bomb.
 
The Pakistani military and intelligence services negotiated an end to the stalemate. The United States would be allowed to take power in Kabul and install a president of their choice. In return, the Taliban leaders and rank and file would be allowed to go home to their villages or into exile across the border in Pakistan.
 
This settlement was not widely publicized in the US and Europe at the time, for obvious reasons, but we reported on it, and it was widely understood in Afghanistan.
 
For best evidence for this negotiated settlement is what happened next. For two years there was no resistance to the American occupation. None, in any village. Many thousands of former Taliban remained in those villages.
 
This is an extraordinary fact. Think of the contrast with Iraq, where resistance was widespread from Day One of the occupation in 2003. Or think of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, met with the same wall of anger.
 
The reason was not simply that the Taliban were not fighting. It was that ordinary people, even in the Taliban heartland in the south, dared to hope that the American occupation would bring Afghanistan peace and develop the economy to end the terrible poverty.
 
Peace was crucial. By 2001 Afghans had been trapped in war for twenty-three years, first a civil war between communists and Islamists, then a war between Islamists and Soviet invaders, then a war between Islamist warlords, and then a war in the north of the country between Islamist warlords and the Taliban.
 
Twenty-three years of war meant death, maiming, exile and refugee camps, poverty, so many kinds of grief, and endless fear and anxiety. Perhaps the best book about what that felt like is Klaits and Gulmanadova Klaits, Love and War in Afghanistan (2005). People were desperate for peace. By 2001 even Taliban supporters felt a bad peace was better than a good war.
 
Also, the United States was fabulously rich. Afghans believed the occupation could lead to development that would rescue them from poverty.
 
Afghans waited. The US delivered war, not peace.
 
The US and UK military occupied bases throughout the villages and small towns of the Taliban heartland, the mainly Pushtun areas of the south and east. These units were never told of the informal settlement negotiated between the Americans and the Taliban. They could not be told, because that would shame the government of President Bush. So the US units saw it as their mission to root out the remaining “bad guys”, who were obviously still there.
 
Night raids crashed through doors, humiliating and terrifying families, taking men away to be tortured for info about the other bad guys. It was here, and in black sites all over the world, that the American military and intelligence developed the new styles of torture that the world would briefly glimpse from Abu Ghraib, the American prison in Iraq.
 
Some of the men detained were Taliban who had not been fighting. Some were just people betrayed to the Americans by local enemies who coveted their land or held a grudge.
 
The American soldier Johnny Rico’s memoir Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green provides a useful account of what then happened next. Outraged relatives and villagers took a few potshots at the Americans in the dark. The American military kicked in more doors and tortured more men. The villagers took more potshots. The Americans called in airstrikes and their bombs killed family after family.
 
War returned across the south and east of the country. 
 
Inequality and corruption spiraled.
 
Afghans had hoped for development that could lift both the rich and the poor. It seemed like such an obvious, and such an easy thing to do. But they did not understand American policy abroad. And they did not understand the deep dedication of the 1% in the United States to spiraling inequality in their own country.
 
So American money poured into Afghanistan. But it went the people in the new government headed by Hamid Karzai. It went to the people working with the Americans and the occupying troops of other nations. And it went to the warlords and their entourages who were deeply involved in the international opium and heroin trade facilitated by the CIA and the Pakistani military. It went to the people lucky enough to own luxury, well-defended homes in Kabul they could rent out to expatriate staff. It went to the men and women who worked in foreign-funded NGOs.
 
Of course people in these groups all overlapped.
 
Afghans had long been used to corruption. They both expected it and hated it. But this time the scale was unprecedented. And in the eyes of the poor and middle income people, all the obscene new wealth, no matter how garnered, seemed to be corruption.
 
Over the last decade the Taliban have offered two things across the country. The first is that they are not corrupt, as they were also not corrupt in office before 2001. They are the only political force in the country this has ever been true of.
 
Critically, the Taliban have run an honest judicial system in the rural areas they have controlled. Their reputation is so high that many people involved in civil lawsuits in the cities have agreed that both parties will go to Taliban judges in the countryside. This allows them swift, cheap and fair justice without massive bribes. Because the justice was fair, both parties can live with it.
 
For people in Taliban-controlled areas, fair justice was also a protection against inequality. When the rich can bribe the judges, they can do anything they want to the poor. Land was the crucial thing. Rich and powerful men, warlords and government officials could seize or steal or cheat their way into control of the land of small farmers, and oppress the even poorer sharecroppers. But Taliban judges, everyone understood, were willing to rule for the poor.
 
Hatred of corruption, of inequality, and of the occupation merged together.
 
20 Years On
 
2001, when the Taliban fell to the Americans after 9/11, is twenty years ago now. Enormous changes happen to political mass movements over twenty years of war and crisis. The Taliban have learned and changed. How could it be otherwise. Many Afghans, and many foreign experts, have commented on this. Giustozzi has used the useful phrase neo-Taliban.[2]
 
This change, as publicly presented, has several aspects. The Taliban have realized that Pushtun chauvinism was a great weakness. They now emphasize that they are Muslims, brothers to all other Muslims, and that they want and have the support of Muslims of many ethnic groups.
 
But there has been a bitter split in Taliban forces over the last few years. A minority of Taliban fighters and supporters have allied themselves with Islamic State. The difference is that Islamic State launch terror attacks on Shias, Sikhs and Christians. The Taliban in Pakistan do the same, and so do the small Haqqani network sponsored by Pakistani intelligence. But the Taliban majority have been reliable in condemning all such attacks.
 
We return to this division later, as it has implications for what will happen next.
 
The new Taliban have also emphasized their concerns for the rights of women. They say they welcome music, and videos, and have moderated the fiercest and most puritanical sides of their former rule. And they are now saying over and over again that they want to rule in peace, without revenge on the people of the old order.
 
How much of this is propaganda, and how much is truth, is hard to tell. Moreover, what happens next is deeply dependent on what happens to the economy, and on the actions of foreign powers. Of that, more later. Our point here is that Afghans have reasons for choosing the Taliban over the Americans, the warlords and Ashraf Ghani’s government.
 
What About Rescuing Afghan Women?
 
Many readers will now be feeling, insistently, but what about Afghan women? The answer is not simple.
 
We have to start by going back to the 1970s. Around the world, particular systems of gendered inequality are entangled with a particular system of class inequality. Afghanistan was no different.
 
Nancy did anthropological fieldwork with Pushtun women and men in the north of the country in the early 1970s. They lived by farming and herding animals. Nancy’s subsequent book, Bartered Brides: Politics and Marriage in a Tribal Society, explains the connections between class, gender and ethnic divisions at that time. And if you want to know what those women themselves thought about their lives, troubles and joys, Nancy and her former partner Richard Tapper have recently published Afghan Village Voices, a translation of many of the tapes that women and men made for them in the field.
 
That reality was complex, bitter, oppressive and full of love. In that deep sense, it was no different from the complexities of sexism and class in the United States. But the tragedy of the next half century would change much of that. That long suffering produced the particular sexism of the Taliban, which is not an automatic product of Afghan tradition.
 
The history of this new turn starts in 1978. Then civil war began between the communist government and the Islamist mujahedin resistance. The Islamists were winning, so the Soviet Union invaded late in 1979 to back up the Communist government. Seven years of brutal war between the Soviets and the mujahedin followed. In 1987 the Soviet troops left, defeated.
 
When we lived in Afghanistan, in the early 1970s, the communists were among the best people. They were driven by three passions. They wanted to develop the country. They wanted to break the power of the big landowners and share out the land. And they wanted equality for women.
 
But in 1978 the communists had taken power in a military coup, led by progressive officers. They had not won the political support of the majority of villagers, in an overwhelming rural country. The result was that the only ways they could deal with the rural Islamist resistance were arrest, torture and bombing. The more the communist led army did such cruelties, the more the revolt grew.
 
Then the Soviet Union invaded to prop up the communists. Their main weapon was bombing from the air, and large parts of the country became free fire zones. Between half a million and a million Afghans were killed. At least another million were maimed for life. Between six and eight million were driven into exile in Iran and Pakistan, and millions more became internal refugees. All this in a country of only twenty-five million people.
 
When they came to power, the first thing the communists tried to do were land reform and legislation for the rights of women. When the Russians invaded, the majority of communists sided with them. Many of those communists were women. The result was to smear the name of feminism with support for torture and massacre.
 
Imagine that the United States was invaded by a foreign power who killed between twelve million and twenty-four million Americans, tortured people in every town, and drove 100 million Americans into exile. Imagine also that almost all feminists in the United States supported the invaders. After that experience, how do you think most Americans would feel about a second invasion by another foreign power, or about feminism?
 
How do you think most Afghan women feel about another invasion, this time by the Americans, justified by the need to rescue Afghan women? Remember, those statistics about the dead, the maimed and the refugees under Soviet occupation were not abstract numbers. They were living women, and their sons and daughters, husbands, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.
 
So when the Soviet Union left, defeated, most people breathed a sigh of relief. But then the local leaders of the mujahedin resistance to the communists and the invaders became local warlords and fought each other for the spoils of victory. The majority of Afghans had supported the mujahedin, but now they were disgusted by the greed, the corruption and the endless useless war.
 
The Class and Refugee Background of the Taliban
 
In the autumn of 1994, the Taliban had arrived in Kandahar, a mostly Pashtun city and the largest in southern Afghanistan. The Taliban were like nothing before in Afghan history. They were products of two quintessentially twentieth century innovations, aerial bombing and the refugee camps in Pakistan. They belonged to a different social class from the elites who had governed Afghanistan.
 
The Communists had been the sons and daughters of the urban middle classes and the middle level farmers in the countryside with enough land to call their own. They had been led by people who attended the country’s sole university in Kabul. They wanted to break the power of the big landowners and modernize the country.
 
The Islamists who fought the Communists had been men of similar class backgrounds, and mostly former students at the same university. They too wanted to modernize the country, but in a different way. And they looked to the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Alzhar University in Cairo.
 
The word Taliban means students in an Islamic school, not a state school or a university. The fighters of the Taliban who entered Kandahar in 1994 were young men who had studied in the free Islamic schools in the refugee camps in Pakistan. They had been children with nothing.
 
The leaders of the Taliban were village mullahs from Afghanistan. They did not have the elite connections of many of the imams of city mosques. Village mullahs could read, and they were held in some respect by other villagers. But their social status was well below that of a landlord, or a high school graduate in a government office.
 
The Taliban were led by a committee of twelve men. All twelve had lost a hand, a foot or an eye to Soviet bombs in the war. The Taliban were, among other things, the party of poor and middling Pushtun village men. [3]
 
Twenty years of war had left Kandahar lawless and at the mercy of warring militias. The turning point came when the Taliban went after a local commander who had raped a boy and two (possibly three) women. The Taliban caught and hung him. What made their intervention striking was not just their determination to put an end to the murderous infighting and restore people’s dignity and safety, but their disgust at the hypocrisy of the other Islamists.
 
From the first the Taliban were funded by the Saudis, the Americans and the Pakistani military. Washington wanted a peaceful country that could house oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia. The Taliban stood out because they brooked no exceptions to the injunctions they sought to impose, and the severity with which they enforced the rules.
 
Many Afghans were grateful for the return of order and a modicum of security, but the Taliban were sectarian and unable to control the country, and, in 1996, the Americans withdrew their support. When they did so, they unleashed a new, and deadly, version of Islamophobia against the Taliban.
 
Almost overnight, Afghan women were deemed helpless and oppressed, while Afghan men – aka the Taliban – were execrated as fanatical savages, paedophiles and sadistic patriarchs, hardly people at all.
 
For four years before 9/11 the Taliban had been targeted by the Americans, while feminists and others clamored for the protection of Afghan women. By the time the American bombing started, everyone was meant to understand that the Afghan women needed help. What could possibly go wrong?
 
9/11 and the American War
 
The bombing began on October 7th. Within days, the Taliban had been forced into hiding – or were literally castrated – as a photograph on the front page of the Daily Mail crowed. The published images of the war were truly shocking in the violence and sadism they portrayed. Many people in Europe were appalled by the scale of the bombing and the utter carelessness of Afghan lives.[4]
 
Yet in the United States that autumn, the mixture of vengeance and patriotism meant dissenting voices were rare and mostly inaudible. Ask yourself, as Saba Mahmood did at the time, ‘Why were conditions of war, (migration, militarization) and starvation (under the mujahideen) considered to be less injurious to women than the lack of education, employment and most notably, in the media campaign, western dress styles (under the Taliban)?’ [5]
 
Then ask again even more fiercely – how could you possibly ‘save Afghan women’ by bombing a civilian population that included, along with the women themselves, their children, their husbands, fathers and brothers? It should have been the question that ended the argument, but it was not.
 
The most egregious expression of feminist Islamophobia came little over a month into the war. A vastly unequal war of revenge doesn’t look very good in the eyes of the world, so better to be doing something that looks virtuous. In anticipation of the American Thanksgiving holiday, on the 17th of November 2001, Laura Bush, the President’s wife, loudly lamented the plight of the veiled Afghan women. Cherie Blair, the British Prime Minister’s wife echoed her sentiments a few days later. These wealthy war-mongers’ wives were using the full weight of the Orientalist paradigm to blame the victims and justify a war against some of the poorest people on earth. And ‘Saving Afghan Women’ became the persistent cry of many liberal feminists to justify the American war.[6]
 
With the election of Obama in 2008, the chorus of Islamophobia became hegemonic among American liberals. That year the American anti-war alliance effectively dissolved itself to aid Obama’s campaign. Democrats and those feminists who supported Obama’s war hawk Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, could not accept the truth that Afghanistan and Iraq were both wars for oil.[7]
 
They had only one justification for the endless wars of oil – the sufferings of Afghan women. The feminist spin was a clever ploy. It precluded comparisons between the undoubted sexist rule of the Taliban and sexisms in the United States. Far more shocking, the feminist spin domesticated and effectively displaced the ugly truths about a grossly unequal war. And it separated those notional ‘women to be saved’ from the tens of thousands of actual Afghan women, and men and children killed, wounded, orphaned or made homeless and hungry by the American bombs.
 
Many of our friends and family members in America are feminists who believed with decent hearts much of this propaganda. But they were being asked to support was a web of lies, a perversion of feminism. It was the feminism of the invader and the corrupt governing elite. It was the feminism of the torturers and the drones.
 
We believe another feminism is possible.
 
But it remains true that the Taliban are deeply sexist. Sexism has won a victory in Afghanistan. But it did not have to be that way.
 
The communists who sided with the cruelties of the Soviet invaders had discredited feminism in Afghanistan for at least a generation. But then the United States invaded, and a new generation of Afghan women professionals sided with the new invaders to try to win rights for women. Their dream too has ended in collaboration, shame and blood. Some were careerists, of course, mouthing platitudes in exchange for funding. But many others were motivated by an honest and selfless dream. Their failure is tragic.
 
Stereotypes and Confusions
 
Outside Afghanistan, there is a great deal of confusion about stereotypes of the Taliban elaborated over the last twenty-five years. But think carefully when you hear the stereotypes that they are feudal, brutal and primitive. These are people with laptops, who have been negotiating with the Americans in Qatar for the last fourteen years.
 
The Taliban are not the product of medieval times. They are the product of some of the worst times of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century. If they look backward in some ways to an imagined better time, that is not surprising. But they have been moulded by life under aerial bombardment, refugee camps, communism, the War of Terror, enhanced interrogation, climate change, internet politics and the spiralling inequality of neoliberalism. They live, like everyone else, now.
 
Their roots in a tribal society can also be confusing. But as Richard Tapper has argued, tribes are not atavistic institutions. They are the way that peasants in this part of the world organise their entanglement with the state. And the history of Afghanistan has never been simply a matter of competing ethnic groups, but rather of complex alliances across groups and divisions within groups.[8]
 
There is a set of prejudices on the left which incline some people to ask how the Taliban could be on the side of the poor and anti-imperialist if they are not “progressive”. Leave aside for the moment that the word progressive means little. Of course the Taliban are hostile to socialism and communism. They themselves, or their parents or grandparents, were killed and tortured by socialists and communists. Moreover, any movement that has fought a twenty-year guerrilla war and defeated a great empire is anti-imperialist, or words have no meaning.
 
Reality is what it is. The Taliban are a movement of poor peasants, against an imperial occupation, deeply misogynist, supported by many women, sometimes racist and sectarian, and sometimes not. That’s a bundle of contradictions produced by history.
 
Another source of confusion is the class politics of the Taliban. How can they be on the side of the poor, as they obviously are, and yet so bitterly opposed to socialism? The answer is that the experience of the Russian occupation stripped away the possibility of socialist formulations about class. But it did not change the reality of class. No one has ever built a mass movement among poor peasants that took power without being seen as on the side of the poor.
 
The Taliban talk not in the language of class, but in the language of justice and corruption. Those words describe the same side.
 
None of this means that the Taliban will necessarily rule in the interests of the poor. We have seen enough peasant revolts come to power in the last century and more, only to become governments by urban elites. And none of this should distract from the truth that the Taliban intend to be dictators, not democrats.
 
A Historic Change in America
 
The fall of Kabul marks a decisive defeat for American power around the world. But it also marks, or makes clear, a deep turning away from the American empire among Americans.
 
One piece of evidence is the opinion polls. In 2001, right after 9/11, between 85% and 90% of Americans approved of the invasion of Afghanistan. The numbers have been dropping steadily. Last month, 62% of Americans approved of Biden’s plan for total withdrawal, and 29% were opposed.
 
This rejection of the war is common on both the right and the left. The working class base of the Republican Party and Trump are against foreign wars. Many soldiers and military families come from the rural areas and the south where Trump is strong. They are against any more wars, for it is they and those they loved who served, died and were wounded.
 
Right wing patriotism in America now is pro-military, but that means pro-soldier, not pro-war. When they say ‘Make America Great Again’, they mean that America is not great now for Americans, not that the US should be more engaged in the world.
 
Among Democrats, too, the working class base is against the wars.
 
There are people who support further military intervention. They are the Obama democrats, the Romney republicans, the generals, many liberal and conservative professionals, and almost everyone in the Washington elite. But the American people as a whole, and especially the working class, black, brown and white, have turned against the American Empire.
 
After the fall of Saigon, the American government was unable to launch major military interventions for the next fifteen years. It may well be longer after the fall of Kabul.
 
The International Consequences
 
Since 1918, 103 years ago, the United States has been the most powerful nation in the world. There have been competing powers – first Germany and Japan, then the Soviet Union and now China. But the US has been dominant. That ‘American Century’ is now coming to an end.
 
The long-term reason is the economic rise of China and the relative economic decline of the United States. But the covid pandemic and the Afghan defeat make the last two years a turning point.
 
The covid pandemic has revealed the institutional incompetence of the ruling class, and the government, of the United States. The system has failed to protect the people. This chaotic and shameful failure is obvious to people around the world.
 
Then there’s Afghanistan. If you judge by expenditure and hardware the United States is overwhelmingly the dominant military power globally. That power has been defeated by poor people in sandals in a small country who have nothing but endurance and courage.
 
The Taliban victory will also give heart to Islamists of many different sorts in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Mali. But it will be true more widely than that.
 
Both the covid failure and the Afghan defeat will reduce the soft power of the US. But Afghanistan is also a defeat for hard power. The strength of the informal empire of the United States has relied for a century on three different pillars. One is being the largest economy in the world, and domination of the global financial system. The second is a reputation in many quarters for democracy, competence and cultural leadership. The third was that if soft power failed, the United States would invade to support dictatorships and punish its enemies.
 
That military power is gone now. No government will believe that the US can rescue them from a foreign invader, or from their own people. Drone killings will continue and cause great suffering. But nowhere will drones on their own be militarily decisive.
 
This is the beginning of the end of the American century.
 
What Happens Now?
 
No one knows what will happen in Afghanistan in the next few years. But we can identify some of the pressures.
 
First, and most hopeful, is the deep longing for peace in the hearts of Afghans. They have now lived through forty-three years of war. Think how only five or ten years of civil war and invasion have scarred so many countries. Now think of forty-three years.
 
Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar, the three most important cities, have all fallen without any violence. This is because the Taliban, as they keep saying, want a country at peace, and they do not want revenge. But it is also because the people who do not support, indeed those who hate the Taliban, also chose not to fight.
 
The Taliban leaders are clearly aware they must deliver peace.
 
For that it is also essential that the Taliban continue to deliver fair justice. Their record is good. But the temptations and pressures of government have corrupted many social movements in many countries before them.
 
Economic collapse is also quite possible. Afghanistan is a poor and arid country, where less than 5% of the land can be farmed. In the last twenty years the cities have swelled immensely. That growth has been dependent on money flowing from the occupation, and to a lesser extent money from growing opium. Without very substantial foreign aid from somewhere, economic collapse will threaten.
 
Because the Taliban know this, they have been explicitly offering the United States a deal. The Americans will give aid, and in return the Taliban will not provide a home for terrorists who could launch attacks like 9/11. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have accepted this deal. But it is not at all clear that the US will keep that promise.
 
Indeed, something worse is entirely possible. Previous US administrations have punished Iraq, Iran, Cuba and Vietnam for their defiance with long running and destructive economic sanctions. There will be many voices raised in the US for such sanctions, to starve Afghan children in the name of human rights.
 
Then there is the threat of international meddling, of different powers supporting different political or ethnic forces inside Afghanistan. The United States, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia and Uzbekistan will all be tempted. It has happened before, and in a situation of economic collapse it could provoke proxy wars.
 
For the moment, though, the governments of Iran, Russia and Pakistan clearly want peace in Afghanistan.
 
The Taliban have also promised not to rule with cruelty. That is easier said than done. Confronted with families who have amassed great fortunes through corruption and crime, what do you think the poor soldiers from the villages will want to do?
 
And then there is climate. In 1971 a drought and famine across the north and center devastated flocks, crops and lives. It was the first sign of the effects of climate change on the region, which has brought further droughts over the last fifty years. Over the medium and long term, farming and herding will become more precarious.[9]
 
All these dangers are real. But the often insightful security expert Antonio Giustozzi is in touch with the thinking among both the Taliban and foreign governments and the Taliban. His article in The Guardian on August 16 was hopeful. He ended it:
 
Since most of the neighbouring countries want stability in Afghanistan, at least for the time being any fissures in the new coalition government are unlikely to be exploited by external actors to create rifts. Similarly, the 2021 losers will struggle to find anybody willing or able to support them in starting some kind of resistance. As long as the new coalition government includes key allies of its neighbours, this is the beginning of a new phase in the history of Afghanistan.[10]
 
What Can You Do? Welcome Refugees.
 
Many people in the West now are asking, “What can we do to help Afghan women?” Sometimes this question assumes that most Afghan women oppose the Taliban, and most Afghan men support them. This is nonsense. It is almost impossible to imagine the kind of society in which that would be true.
 
But there is a narrower question here. Specifically, how can they help Afghan feminists?
 
This is a valid and decent question. The answer is to organize to buy them airplane tickets and give them refuge in Europe and North America.
 
But it is not just feminists who will need asylum. Tens of thousands of people who worked for the occupation are desperate for asylum, with their families. So are larger numbers of people who worked for the Afghan government.
 
Some of these people are admirable, some are corrupt monsters, many lie in between, and many are just children. But there is a moral imperative here. The United States and the NATO countries have created immense suffering for twenty years. The least, the very least, they should do it rescue the people whose lives they have wrecked.
 
There is another moral issue here too. What many Afghans have learned in the last forty years has also been clear in the last decade of the torment of Syria. It is all too easy to understand the accidents of background and personal history which lead people to do the things they do. Humility compels us to look at the young communist woman, the educated feminist working for an NGO, the suicide bomber, the American marine, the village mullah, the Taliban fighter, the bereaved mother of a child killed by American bombs, the Sikh money changer, the policeman, the poor farmer growing opium, and to say, there but for the grace of God go I.
 
The failure of the American and British governments to rescue the people who worked for them has been both shameful and revealing. It is not really a failure, but a choice. Racism against immigration has weighed more strongly with Johnson and Biden than the debts of humanity.
 
Campaigns to welcome Afghans are still possible. Of course such a strong moral argument will come up against racism and Islamophobia at every turn. But in the last week the governments of Germany and Netherlands have both suspended any deportations of Afghans.
 
Every politician, anywhere, who speaks in support of Afghan women must be asked, again and again, to open the borders to all Afghans.
 
And then there is what might happen to the Hazaras. As we have said, the Taliban have stopped being simply a Pushtun movement and have gone national, recruiting many Tajiks and Uzbeks. And also, they say, some Hazaras. But not many.
 
The Hazaras are the people who traditionally lived in the central mountains. Many also migrated to cities like Mazar and Kabul, where they worked as porters and in other low paid jobs. They are about 15% of the Afghan population. The roots of enmity between Pushtuns and Hazaras lie partly in long standing disputes over land and rights to grazing.
 
But more recently it also matters a good deal that Hazaras are Shias, and almost all other Afghans are Sunnis.
 
The bitter conflicts between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq have led to a split in the militant Islamist tradition. This split is complicated, but important, and needs a bit of explanation.
 
In both Iraq and in Syria the Islamic State have committed massacres against Shias, just as Shia militias have massacred Sunnis in both countries.
 
The more traditional Al Qaeda networks have remained staunchly opposed to attacking Shias and argued for solidarity between Muslims. People often point out that Osama Bin Laden’s mother was herself a Shia – actually an Alawite from Syria. But the necessity of unity has been more important. This was the main issue in the split between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
 
In Afghanistan the Taliban have also argued strongly for Islamic unity. The sexual exploitation of women by Islamic State is also deeply repugnant to Taliban values, which are deeply sexist but puritanical and modest. For many years the Afghan Taliban have been consistent in their public condemnation of all terror attacks on Shias, Christians and Sikhs.
 
Yet those attacks happen. The ideas of Islamic State have had a particular influence on the Pakistani Taliban. The Afghan Taliban are an organization. The Pakistani Taliban are a looser network, not controlled by the Afghans. They have carried out repeated bombings against Shias and Christians in Pakistan.
 
It is Islamic State and the Haqqani network who have carried out the recent racist terror bombings of Hazaras and Sikhs in Kabul. The Taliban leadership have condemned all those attacks.
 
But the situation is in flux. Islamic State in Afghanistan is a minority breakaway from the Taliban, largely based in Ningrahar province in the east. They are bitterly anti-Shia. So are the Haqqani network, a long-standing mujahedin group largely controlled by Pakistani military intelligence. Yet in the present mix, the Haqqani network have been integrated into the Taliban organization, and their leader is one of the leaders of the Taliban.
 
But no one can be sure what the future holds. In 1995 an uprising of Hazara workers in Mazar prevented the Taliban gaining control of the north. But Hazara traditions of resistance go much deeper and further back than that.
 
Hazara refugees in neighboring countries may also be in danger now. The government of Iran are allying with the Taliban, and begging them to be peaceful. They are doing this because there are about three million Afghan refugees already in Iran. Most of them have been there for years, most are poor urban workers and their families, and the majority are Hazaras. Recently the Iranian government, in desperate economic straights themselves, have begun deporting Afghans back to Afghanistan.
 
There are about a million Hazara refugees in Pakistan too. In the region around Quetta more than 5,000 of them have been killed in sectarian assassinations and massacres in the last few years. The Pakistani police and army do nothing. Given the long support of the Pakistani army and intelligence for the Afghan Taliban, those people will be at greater risk right now.
 
What should you do, outside Afghanistan? Like most Afghans, pray for peace. And join protests for open borders.
 
We will leave the last word to Graham Knight. His son, Sergeant Ben Knight of the British Royal Air Force, was killed in Afghanistan in 2006. This week Graham Knight told the Press Association the UK government should have moved quickly to rescue civilians:
 
 “We’re not surprised that the Taliban have taken over because as soon as the Americans and the British said they were going to leave, we knew this was going to happen. The Taliban made their intent very clear that, as soon as we went out, they would move in.
 
As for whether people’s lives were lost through a war that wasn’t winnable, I think they were. I think the problem was we were fighting people that were native to the country. We weren’t fighting terrorists, we were fighting people who actually lived there and didn’t like us being there.” [11]
 
REFERENCES
 
Fluri, Jennifer L. and Rachel Lehr. 2017. The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements. Athens OH: University of Georgia Press.
 
Giustozzi, Antonio. 2007. Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. London: Hurst.
 
—, ed. 2009. Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field. London: Hurst.
 
—, 2021. ‘The Taliban have retaken Afghanistan – this time, how will they rule it?’ The Guardian, August 16.
 
Gregory, Thomas. 2011. ‘Rescuing the Women of Afghanistan: Gender, Agency and the Politics of Intelligibility.’University of Manchester PhD thesis.
 
Hirschkind, Charles and Saba Mahmood. 2002. ‘Feminism, the Taliban and the Politics of Counterinsurgency.’ Anthropological Quarterly, 75(2): 339-354. 
 
Hughes, Dana. 2012. ‘The First Ladies Club: Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush for the Women of Afghanistan.’ ABC News, March 21.
 
Jalalzai, Zubeda and David Jefferess, eds. 2011. Globalizing Afghanistan: Terrorism, War, and the Rhetoric of Nation Building. Durham: Duke University Press.
 
Klaits, A. & G. Gulmanadova-Klaits. 2005. Love and War in Afghanistan, New York: Seven Stories.
 
Kolhatkar, Sonali and James Ingalls. 200. Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. New York: Seven Stories.
 
Lindisfarne, Nancy. 2002a. ‘Gendering the Afghan War.’ Eclipse: The Anti-War Review, 4: 2-3.
 
—. 2002b. ‘Starting from Below: Fieldwork. Gender and Imperialism Now.’ Critique of Anthropology, 22(4): 403-423, and in Armbruster and Laerke, 23-44.
 
—. 2012. ‘Exceptional Pashtuns?’ Class Politics, Imperialism and Historiography.’ In Marsden and Hopkins.
 
Lindisfarne, Nancy and Jonathan Neale, 2015. ‘Oil Empires and Resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.’ Anne Bonny Pirate.
 
—. 2019. ‘Oil, Heat and Climate Jobs in the MENA Region.’ In Environmental Challenges in the MENA Region: The Long Road from Conflict to Cooperation, edited by Hamid Pouran and Hassan Hakimian, 72-94. London: Ginko.
 
Manchanda, Nivi. 2020. Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 
Marsden, Magnus and Benjamin Hopkins, eds. 2012. Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. London: Hurst.
 
Mihailovič, Konstantin. 1975. Memoirs of a Janissary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
 
Mount, Ferdinand. 2008. Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes. London: Bloomsbury.
 
Mousavi, Sayed Askar, 1998. The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study. London: Curzon.
 
Neale, Jonathan. 1981. ‘The Afghan Tragedy.’ International Socialism, 12: 1-32.
 
—. 1988. ‘Afghanistan: The Horse Changes Riders,’ Capital and Class, 35: 34-48.
 
—. 2002. ‘The Long Torment of Afghanistan.’ International Socialism 93: 31-59.
 
—. 2008. ‘Afghanistan: The Case Against “the Good War”.’ International Socialism, 120: 31-60.
 
Nojumi, Neamatollah. 2002. The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave.
 
Rico, Johnny. 2007. Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America. New York: Presidio.
 
Tapper (Lindisfarne), Nancy. 1991. Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 
Tapper, Richard, ed. 1983. The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. London: Croom Helm.
 
Tapper, Richard, with Nancy Lindisfarne. 2020. Afghan Village Voices: Stories from a Tribal Community. London: I.B. Tauris.
 
The Guardian, 2021. ‘Afghanistan Live News.’ August 16.
 
Ward, Lucy, 2001. ‘Leader’s Wives Join Propaganda War.’ The Guardian, Nov 17.
 
Zaeef, Abdul, 2010. My Life with the Taliban. London: Hirst.
 
Zilizer, Barbie. 2005. ‘Death in Wartime: Photographs and the ‘Other War’ in Afghanistan.’ The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 10(3): 26-55.
 
[1] See especially Nancy Tapper (Lindisfarne), 1991; Lindisfarne, 2002a, 2002b and 2012; Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015; Neale, 1981, 1988, 2002 and 2008; Richard Tapper with Lindisfarne, 2020.
 
[2] Giustozzi, 2007 and 2009 are especially useful.
 
[3] On the class basis of the Taliban, see Lindisfarne, 2012, and many chapters by other authors in Marsden and Hopkins, 2012. And see Moussavi, 1998; Nojumi, 2002; Giustozzi, 2008 and 2009; Zareef, 2010.
 
[4] Zilizer, 2005.
 
[5] There is a vast literature on saving Afghan women. See Gregory, 2011; Lindisfarne, 2002a; Hirschkind and Mahmood, 2002; Kolhatkar and Ingalls, 2006; Jalalzai and Jefferess,2011; Fluri and Lehr, 2017; Manchanda, 2020.
 
[6] Ward, 2001.
 
[7] Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015
 
[8] Richard Tapper, 1983.
 
[9] For the drought in 1971, see Tapper and Lindisfarne, 2020. For more recent climate change, see Lindisfarne and Neale, 2019.
 
[10] Giustozzi, 2021.
 
[11] The Guardian, 2021.
 

Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation. By Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. Anne Bonny Pirate, August 17, 2021