“There are too many whose idea of ‘critical’ is limited to saying some development was problematic but some was quite good, if only there had been more of that ‘good’ development.
The most stunning imperial formation was that the War in Afghanistan was unquestionable–whether as an act of revenge and/or care (for Afghan women).
The friend/enemy distinction has been marked on to women’s bodies playing out in a fundamentalist logic of either supporting education or not supporting education, supporting the Taliban or condemning them.
The Kite Runner made everyone feel they knew Afghanistan. Like white people who watched the TV serial The Wire that came out about the same time as the beginning of the US war and occupation of Afghanistan. Suddenly white liberals felt they knew the deep struggles of racialized people in Baltimore, and elsewhere, because they watched The Wire, and liked the character Omar.
The critique was only of the withdrawal, not of the war, as if to believe that the entire war was not as fumbling and insanely violent as the withdrawal.
Many on the left were ecstatic in announcing US Empire’s defeat in Afghanistan, egg on the face of US Empire, and all. I’m stunned by the simplicity of that take.
There is a complete failure to account for the violence done by socialist regimes in Afghanistan, whether Soviet-backed or not and/or before or after the Soviet invasion.
The ‘anti-imperialist’ left similarly reads the world through its own reductive geopolitics of what constitutes resistance. We recently see it with many on the left, either denying or diminishing mass murder by the Assad regime in Syria [That includes a section of the British left].
I was told by some in the Afghan diaspora that to critique the WoT [War on Terror] was to excuse the Taliban, when in reality the state and its allies had committed violence that eclipsed any other violence.”
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