In Octo­ber, America’s war in Afghanistan will turn 17. At that point, it will be old enough to go and fight in itself — and there is no end in sight. The Unit­ed States esca­lat­ed the war in 2018 by increas­ing the num­ber of its troops and airstrikes, and this year is bring­ing a record-high num­ber of civil­ian deaths. Afghanistan has the worst rate of infant mor­tal­i­ty in the world and ranks 175 out of 186 coun­tries on the Human Devel­op­ment Index. Mil­lions of Afghans live in severe pover­ty, unem­ploy­ment is high, 41 per­cent of Afghan chil­dren under the age of five are stunt­ed and 33 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is food inse­cure. While the U.S‑led efforts to paci­fy the coun­try have often been ratio­nal­ized on the grounds that they will sup­pos­ed­ly lead to the eman­ci­pa­tion of Afghan women, just 8.8 per­cent of adult women have reached sec­ondary school (com­pared to 35.4 per­cent of men), and the Afghan gov­ern­ment — which the Unit­ed States is fight­ing to keep in pow­er — is ignor­ing vio­lence against women. Tor­ture under that gov­ern­ment is wide­spread and on the rise, with a quar­ter of the vic­tims under the age of 18.

These are the con­di­tions that pre­vail under U.S occupation.

Since the 2001 inva­sion, the Unit­ed States and its part­ners have car­ried out spec­tac­u­lar crimes in Afghanistan. Less than a month into the war, the Unit­ed States scat­tered clus­ter bombs over a civil­ian vil­lage, and bombed a mosque and a hos­pi­tal. A 2007 U.S‑NATO bomb­ing in Hel­mand province’s Gereshk dis­trict killed many civil­ians, pos­si­bly more than 100. A year lat­er, a U.S‑led coali­tion airstrike in Nan­ga­har province killed 47 Afghan civil­ians at a wed­ding. The next month, an Amer­i­can bomb­ing in Her­at killed 90 civil­ians. An Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al report exam­ines 10 cas­es from 2009 to 2013 where ​“main­ly U.S. forces were respon­si­ble for civil­ian deaths, most­ly through air strikes or night raids. At least 140 civil­ians were killed in these inci­dents, includ­ing preg­nant women and at least 50 children.”

No one has ever been held account­able for these atroc­i­ties. In Octo­ber 2015, a Médecins Sans Fron­tières (MSF) trau­ma cen­ter in Kun­duz was destroyed by a sus­tained bomb­ing cam­paign by U.S.-led coali­tion forces that killed at least 42 patients, 14 staff and 4 care­tak­ers. The Unit­ed States claims that this was an acci­dent, but MSF says it gave the hospital’s GPS coor­di­nates to the coali­tion four days before the attack. MSF reports, ​“Our patients burned in their beds, our med­ical staff were decap­i­tat­ed or lost limbs. Oth­ers were shot from the air while they fled the burn­ing building.”

Dead­ly U.S. bomb­ings con­tin­ue to the present. Less than two weeks ago, a U.S. bomb­ing killed 14 Afghan civil­ians, three of them chil­dren, in Kun­duz. That’s not an exhaus­tive list of U.S crimes in Afghanistan, but as long as the Unit­ed States and its part­ners are bomb­ing Afghanistan, more hor­rors can be expected.

The Unit­ed Nations finds that anti-gov­ern­ment ele­ments such as the Tal­iban and daesh (the so-called ​“Islam­ic State”) are behind the major­i­ty of the attacks that have killed civil­ians so far in 2018. But it also notes ​“a sharp increase in civil­ian casu­al­ties” from airstrikes car­ried out by pro-gov­ern­ment forces, a coali­tion in which Amer­i­ca is a cen­tral play­er, with 1,047 civil­ians killed by this side of the war thus far in 2018. There’s good rea­son to believe that the U.S‑led coali­tion is respon­si­ble for a greater por­tion of the civil­ian deaths than the UN report sug­gest. Civil­ian casu­al­ty track­ing in Afghanistan, con­duct­ed by the U.S. and Afghan gov­ern­ments, is gross­ly inad­e­quate—hard­ly a sur­prise giv­en that the per­pe­tra­tors are in charge of deter­min­ing their own guilt.

The Unit­ed States and its part­ners also share blame for Afghan civil­ian deaths caused by anti-gov­ern­ment forces. Accord­ing to the Inter­na­tion­al Mil­i­tary Tri­bunal at Nurem­berg con­duct­ed after World War II, a war of aggres­sion is ​“the supreme inter­na­tion­al crime dif­fer­ing only from oth­er war crimes in that it con­tains with­in itself the accu­mu­lat­ed evil of the whole.” What this means is that who­ev­er starts a war is respon­si­ble for all the atroc­i­ties that occur in that war. The 2001 U.S‑led inva­sion of Afghanistan was a war of aggres­sion. The attack was not autho­rized by the Unit­ed Nations, which means it was ille­gal. Nor is the argu­ment that the Unit­ed States had to invade because of the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 mas­sacre ten­able. In the ear­ly days of the U.S. bomb­ing of Afghanistan, the Afghan gov­ern­ment offered to dis­cuss turn­ing over Osama bin Laden if the Unit­ed States stopped its airstrikes. But the Bush admin­is­tra­tion called this ​“non-nego­tiable,” opt­ing to wage more war and to replace the oppres­sive, misog­y­nis­tic Tal­iban with the North­ern Alliance, an out­fit, in the words of Robert Fisk, wrought with ​“gang­sters,” and ​“well-known rapists and mur­ders” of Afghan civilians.

That the Unit­ed States and its part­ners are cul­pa­ble for ​“the accu­mu­lat­ed evil of the whole” in Afghanistan is even clear­er in view of the longer-term his­to­ry. America’s assault on the coun­try did not real­ly begin in 2001. As the jour­nal­ist Robert Drey­fuss shows in Devil’s Game, it dates to the ear­ly 1970s when the Unit­ed States and its part­ners — par­tic­u­lar­ly Pak­istan and Sau­di Ara­bia — con­spired to hand­cuff Afghanistan’s pro­gres­sives, nation­al­ists and left­ists — all of whom were strong at the time. These poli­cies under­mined Afghanistan’s hopes for a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety, nev­er mind one with any degree of socio-eco­nom­ic equal­i­ty. The U.S‑led alliance’s pol­i­cy reached its apoth­e­o­sis lat­er that decade when it empow­ered an insur­gency of vio­lent arch-reac­tionar­ies, unleash­ing a dev­as­tat­ing war and the emer­gence of the U.S‑backed Tal­iban gov­ern­ment in the 1990s.

Api­ra­tions of the rul­ing class

To under­stand America’s near­ly 50 years of vio­lent inter­ven­tion in Afghanistan, it is nec­es­sary to eval­u­ate the efforts of the U.S. rul­ing class to secure polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic pri­ma­cy, a process that nec­es­sary includes keep­ing poten­tial chal­lengers at bay. Afghanistan is rich with nat­ur­al gas, and Afghanistan has oil reserves that in 2010 were dis­cov­ered to be sub­stan­tial­ly larg­er than pre­vi­ous­ly thought. Afghanistan has an esti­mat­ed $1 to $3 tril­lion in min­er­al wealth that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has ogled. This includes gold, cop­per, iron, mer­cury, lead, ura­ni­um, chromi­um, lithi­um and an array of rare met­als, resources that are used in cell phones, com­put­ers and mil­i­tary goods.

As a result of the cur­rent war, the Unit­ed States under­took super­vi­sion of the pri­va­ti­za­tion seg­ments of the Afghan econ­o­my. A 2010 U.S State Depart­ment report notes that Afghanistan has ​“tak­en sig­nif­i­cant steps toward fos­ter­ing a busi­ness-friend­ly envi­ron­ment for both for­eign and domes­tic invest­ment.” Schol­ar Michael Skinner’s research leads him to con­clude that the war in Afghanistan is ​“being used by the U.S.-led Empire of Cap­i­tal as a bridge­head to open all [of] Eura­sia to glob­al free trade while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­tain­ing the aspi­ra­tions of poten­tial challengers.”

Afghanistan shared a bor­der with the Sovi­et Union and shares one with Chi­na, a com­peti­tor of the U.S rul­ing class, and anoth­er with Iran, at present one of U.S. elites’ most hat­ed adver­saries. The val­ue of this real estate is laid bare by Chi­nese and Iran­ian infra­struc­ture projects in Afghanistan — in addi­tion to those of India — which are cru­cial for deter­min­ing the trade routes that will be required to export Afghanistan’s resources. As Adam Hanieh of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don points out, the Afghanistan-Pak­istan region is at the inter­sec­tion of the Gulf and Cen­tral Asia, form­ing ​“the cross­roads of these two ener­gy-rich areas.” This may go a long way to explain­ing the mil­i­tary bases the Unit­ed States has con­struct­ed in Afghanistan, some of which are mas­sive, sug­gest­ing Amer­i­ca may be intend­ing to stay in the coun­try and use it as a launch­ing pad for attacks with­in and pos­si­bly beyond Afghanistan’s borders.

The degree to which the U.S rul­ing class has suc­ceed­ed in its pur­suit of these goals remains an open ques­tion, but it’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that the U.S eco­nom­ic and for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment does not val­ue hav­ing a mil­i­tary pres­ence and allied gov­ern­ment in such a strate­gic neigh­bor­hood. Zbig­niew Brzezin­s­ki, a chief archi­tect of the Carter administration’s plan to arm the muja­hedeen and lat­er an advi­sor to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, was frank about this in 1997, writ­ing that ​“the dis­tri­b­u­tion of pow­er on the Eurasian land­mass will be of deci­sive impor­tance to America’s glob­al primacy.”

Get­ting out of Afghanistan

End­ing the war is the pre­con­di­tion for Afghans to be able to have even min­i­mal phys­i­cal safe­ty and access to social ser­vices, let alone any lofti­er polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions beyond that. Danielle Bell, human rights chief for the UN Assis­tance Mis­sion in Afghanistan, notes that con­flict-relat­ed vio­lence is erod­ing the rights of chil­dren to edu­ca­tion, health­care, free­dom of move­ment, fam­i­ly life, play­ing out­doors and oth­er­wise enjoy­ing a child­hood free of the ​“bru­tal effects of war.” The war dis­placed 437,907 peo­ple in 2017 alone, and inter­nal­ly-dis­placed peo­ple lack ade­quate hous­ing, food, water, health care and oppor­tu­ni­ties to pur­sue edu­ca­tion and employ­ment. As the UN Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­i­an Affairs puts it, ​“Afghanistan has been in pro­tract­ed con­flict for almost thir­ty five years, which has seri­ous­ly ham­pered pover­ty reduc­tion and devel­op­ment, strained the fab­ric of soci­ety and deplet­ed its cop­ing mech­a­nisms.” These are among ​“the accu­mu­lat­ed evil of the whole” wrought by America’s war on Afghanistan.

After near­ly a half cen­tu­ry, the jury is in: Afghanistan will not be safe or free under U.S tute­lage. It’s time for the war to end and a cen­tral require­ment of that is that Amer­i­ca get out.