This blog is dedicated to Zaki Anwari, the 17-year-old student and soccer player from Afghanistan who fell to his death trying to hang on to an evacuation plane. (Picture at end)
“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight . . .”
So opens the epic poem introduced to me by my girlfriend in the summer of 1980. It continues . . .
“This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
leaped like the roe . . . ?”
I was just smart enough to marry that girlfriend, now my wife of some forty years. We recently started rereading Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882) aloud. While I was smitten beyond words, then and now, Longfellow’s writing about star-crossed lovers — read on — of the mid-1700s has many lessons for today. And today has to do with the people of Afghanistan.
One has to wonder how many hearts that “leaped like deer” are now being separated by the aftermath of the U.S. War in that Muslim country. Some families or parts of families have already arrived in New Haven, just as climate refugees from Puerto Rico, after Hurricane Maria, poured into Waterbury a few years ago.
U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was for twenty years. The Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates all war costs since 9/11 at nearly 1 million dead directly and $8 trillion – and counting. Then there are the forced migrations and its own trail of tears.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/BudgetaryCosts
Ask yourself . . . why?
Maybe some history will help.
In 1763, the people of Acadia – think maritime provinces of Canada – then roughly a population of 13,000, must have asked themselves a similar question. Victims of the imperialist rivalries of France and England – the English won -, 10,000 Acadians were scattered to points south by land, and to France, and French colonies, by sea. As with all forced migrations, thousands died of disease and malnutrition.
At the heart of their rapidly developing mercantile capitalism was land and all natural resources e.g. furs, fish, and minerals, establishing trading posts, and increasingly exploiting local labor. Imperialists were on the move. When England “won ”, local Acadians mostly of French ancestry, and especially native peoples, were the big losers.
This imperialist rivalry was about the economics of exploitation and the politics to secure it. When the politics couldn’t be worked out amicably among imperialist powers, war followed. In a word, it was systemic.
Back to modern times. What about Afghanistan?
In the late 1970s, the USA wanted listening posts into the then Soviet Union. The mountains of Afghanistan “fit the bill”. A developing socialist movement and government in Kabul was in the way. The Carter Administration had its state department fund/arm the Mujahideen – who, in turn, attacked the socialist government.
To make a long story short, the Mujahideen became al Qaida and the Taliban. When the government in Kabul asked the then Soviet Union for help, the Carter Administration had a classic “liberal” anticommunist, human rights cover. Their pretext set out to “free” the oppressed people, usually emphasizing women.
Of course, the USA could not control these out-of-the 14th century fundamentalist terrorists. After 9/11, it was now time to oust them. Jumping ahead, and as the British found out in the 19th century, it didn’t work out so well – an understatement.
In the meantime, as in earlier colonial Acadia times, capitalists wanted in on the profiteering. Nowadays they are big-time. The energy company UNICAL wanted to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. The Michael Moore film 9/11 makes a connection between Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President installed by the USA, and UNICAL.
Even one of the January 6th invaders of the U.S. Capitol complained about his military time in Afghanistan guarding energy facilities. Unfortunately, he sided with the developing fascist and billionaire in the White House at the time. Who you blame makes a big difference.
With billions of dollars of U.S. tax dollars made available, the private for-profit contractors moved in quickly. FedEx, Boeing, Raytheon, Columbia Helicopters, and Amentum. Fluor alone took in $3.1billion. As BLM says about racist policing, it’s the system and disasters follow.
Going back once again to the Acadian forced migration, while Longfellow made up the names, Evangeline and Gabriel, two such lovers did exist and were divided on their wedding day. It was Nathaniel Hawthorne who helped his poet friend confirm the story.
But it was Longfellow who went on to expose the disasters of this earlier imperialist war with his memorable poem. He also supported abolitionism in the mid-1800s. One can only imagine the divided families and lovers with slavery being attached to the market. Part of the roots of today’s radical political movements can be found with him, as well as Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman.
We need more explanatory epic poems. It is a good chance that, as night falls in Afghanistan, a writer there is hard at work.
Zaki Anwari died at the Kabul airport while trying to flee Kabul, his soccer federation said. Credit…Afghan Soccer Federation.
lenyannielli 
How is Norway connected to Afghanistan? Well almost 10,000 Norwegian soldiers participated in the US/NATO forces occupying and devastating Afghanistan. But that is not the reason for bringing up Norway. During World War II the NAZIs invaded in 1941 and occupied Norway to extract its resources for the war effort and to exclude the Allies. Norwegian traitors who took leadership conscripted and sent Norwegian soldiers to fight with NAZI troops against the USSR. Who were these traitors? One was named Vidkun Quisling. He had formed a copycat – unpopular – NAZI party in Norway. Under the NAZI occupation he became Prime Minister. In 1945 when Germany lost the war and Norwegian patriots retook their country Quisling was captured and imprisoned, soon convicted of war crimes and executed. But even back in the early days of the war the term “quisling” began to be used to slam traitors and supporters of a foreign occupying military. Quisling still has that connotation. Today the US government and media are bending over backwards to bemoan the fate of all the Afghans who worked for and supported the foreign invading, occupying forces. We can imagine each individual joined to support the US/NATO occupiers in controlling and devastating their homeland for many different reasons. Even though most of them do not hold the position that the bourgeois Quisling did, nonetheless they took sides. Shall we call them quislings? Why are our country’s leaders treating them like, or at least implying that they are, heroes? At least let’s critically look at the situation we face today. Comparisons of the US exit from Afghanistan with its exit from Vietnam are repeatedly made. But the situations are quite different in important ways. First, although in both Vietnam and Afghanistan the US installed corrupt puppet governments that were widely unpopular, in the former case the liberation forces – the southern National Liberation Front and its allies from the north – had wide, historical majority popularity whereas in the latter case the Taliban is generally less unpopular than the puppet government. Second, in the case of Vietnam, the US never created, trained, weaponized and supported the National Liberation forces. But in Afghanistan in the 1970s, 80s and 90s the US and its allies created, trained, weaponized and supported the Taliban, al Qaida, Osama bin Laden and warlords. – all in order to suppress and ultimately destroy a socialist, progressive, pro-women government. Finally, let’s not jump to the conclusion that the US is now the unalterable foe of the Taliban, unable to work with it. In the latter part of the last century the Taliban had been US imperialism’s ally. It is no stretch to imagine that the Taliban will once again be allied with the US against Afghanistan’s neighbors, which include Iran, China and Russia, all currently demonized by the Washington – Wall Street axis. And it’s not beyond imagination that the quislings, in whichever country they end up, who know Afghanistan’s languages, cultures and land will once again be called on to promote the treacherous imperial enterprise.