By Wen Qing
“Kabul, Afghanistan, I love my job!” Nicole L. Gee, a 23-year-old marine from California posted on her Instagram on August 21, holding up a photo of herself cradling an Afghan newborn. The image also made it onto the U.S. Department of Defense’s social media pages.
Six days later, this young and promising woman died in a suicide bomb attack outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The blast was claimed by ISIS-K, a radical terrorist organization in Afghanistan. Altogether, 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghanistan civilians lost their lives either in the explosion or the ensuing gunfire by U.S. soldiers.
It is a hugely painful fact that Gee and her colleagues died in a terrorist incident just a few days before the conclusion of the two-decade U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
The year 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, which claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people and was followed by a major adjustment in U.S. policy on the Greater Middle East. The shift in focus intended to uproot terrorism and transform the target countries according to its own values.
Ground realities: War, conflict, chaos… The current situation in the Middle East is largely viewed as the legacy of U.S. policy. Together with its somewhat inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan, a promised military pullback from Iraq, as well as stagnant development in other countries as a consequence of the Arab Spring movement, one can’t help but wonder: What lessons or experiences can we draw from the U.S. actions in the Middle East? And, moving forward, how will the U.S. reshape its strategy for the region?
“It’s fair to say the U.S. Middle East policy has been an outright failure, especially in the past 20 years,” Gao Shangtao, an associate professor at China Foreign Affairs University (CFAU), told Beijing Review.
Following the September 11 tragedy, the war on terror became the top priority of the George W. Bush administration (2001-09), which resulted in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively.
To measure success or failure, one must refer to the desired objectives. “The U.S. war on terror was successful, if success were to be measured only by killing Osama bin Laden,” Gao said. “But if killing Bin Laden was the goal, then why didn’t the U.S. troops pull out of the country in 2011 when this objective was achieved?”
Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda is far from being destroyed, despite President Joe Biden stating the organization had been fully wiped out in his speech defending the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Even the Pentagon shot down this claim.
According to a UN report released in June, Al-Qaeda is still present in at least 15 Afghan provinces, primarily those in the eastern, southern and southeastern parts. It is, in fact, far more than just “there.” It has, in fact, gone on to breed other terrorist organizations. The so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) extremist group, responsible for multiple brutal attacks across the region and Europe, emerged from the remnants of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and actively seeks to conquer and rule territory. What’s more, there are concerns that the Taliban’s recapture of power will prove beneficial to Al-Qaeda as they are reportedly closely connected.
U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley recently warned of an increase in terrorist threats targeting the U.S., following the rapid fall of Kabul. Taliban fighters celebrate during a rally in Kabul on August 31 after the U.S. pulled all its troops out of Afghanistan (VISUAL PEOPLE)
Arab Spring to Arab Winter: The war on terror aside, in his speech on November 6, 2003, Bush avowed another highly ambitious U.S. goal: so-called “democratic transformation” of the Greater Middle East.
–The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News Exchange Item
