I mean, honestly, they probably would have been anyway and yes, I’m getting tired of writing about Afghanistan, but the time to say things about a subject which need to be said is when people are paying attention.
Anyway.
Squeezing Afghanistan some more after spending 40 years destroying it in so many different ways https://t.co/xNhumefL77
— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) August 21, 2021
Sanctions don’t work to get countries to do what you want: They haven’t worked with North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, or Cuba. But what they will do is force Afghanistan to get help where it’s available, from the same countries willing to help Iran, which is to say the US’s geopolitical enemies: Russia and China.
If you take a look at a map you can see that both Russia and China really want Afghanistan to be friendly, and willing to let through trade and traffic, plus there are all the minerals, and so on.
If the US had not kept treating the Taliban as enemies, they might have been able to to avoid a tight alliance: All it takes is spending some of the war cash on Afghanistan even though the war has ended. But Americans so often don’t do realpolitik, they just pretend to. So much is about feelings, not interests.
China was always the rising power, but there was no need for Russia or Iran to be its ally. Likewise, the rise of sanctions as the US’s favorite weapon, even above drones, is essentially forcing half the world to create an alternate payments system and end the dollar’s role as world reserve currency, though it may keep that status in part of the world.
Dollar hegemony is a large part of American hegemony, so this seems foolish, but the same elites who couldn’t understand why occupying Afghanistan was stupid, or why using murder squads and drones which kill 90 percent civilians was just making the Taliban stronger, are also incapable of actually managing US interests, even in the coldest, hardest, evil, but semi-pragmatic, terms.
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