20 years of US occupation worsened Afghanistan crisis: China

TEHRAN, Aug. 14 (MNA) – The Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin has said that the forced transformation imposed by the US on Afghanistan has worsened the crisis of human survival and national development.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin made the remarks in his regular press conference on August 12 and in response to the media's question, "According to reports, more than 70 economists and experts from other fields recently wrote to US President Biden and Treasury Secretary Yellen, criticizing the US government’s executive order that divided the $7 billion of frozen assets of the Afghan central bank into two and calling on the government to immediately return the assets in full. This open letter was published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and co-signed by Nobel Laureate for Economics Joseph Stiglitz as well as other global scholars. What is China’s comment on that?"

The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded, “I have noted that this open letter pointed out that the US government’s decision to seize Afghanistan’s $7 billion foreign exchange reserves “contributed mightily to Afghanistan’s economic collapse”. The US government’s “decision to divide these funds in two is arbitrary and unjustified” and “undermines the recovery” of the Afghan economy."

Wenbib added, "I also noted that it has been almost one year since the US withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. Critics around the world have argued that the US still hasn’t stopped doing harm to the Afghan people. If anything, it has been aggravated. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that millions of Afghans are on the “verge of death”. An official of the World Food Program pointed out at 98% of Afghans are facing food insecurity and nearly half of the Afghan children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition."

He further said, “Nearly 20 years of “forced transformation” imposed by the US on Afghanistan have not only failed to lift the Afghan people out of poverty and turbulence but also worsened the crisis of human survival and national development. This is yet another textbook example of how US democracy destabilizes the world. Although US troops have left Afghanistan, the crimes done against the country still persist. Unless the US stops harming the Afghan people, their ordeal will not end.” 

“We urge the US to own up to its wrongdoing and take real action to heal Afghan people’s trauma, and show accountability to the world,”  Wenbin added.

AY/PR

A year after humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, US keeps on warmongering

New York, IRNA – Hazardous and humiliating pull-out of the US forces from Afghanistan can be seen as the sunset of Washington’s hegemony in West Asia, as the White House is still suffering from the heavy price of the defeat one year after the failure.

The administration of George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in 2001 under the excuse of terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the severe damage done to the Pentagon on September 11 in the same year. Accompanied by its NATO allies the US attacked Afghanistan to hunt al-Qaeda elements and overthrow their Taliban supporters, but the 21-year invasion destroyed Afghanistan’s political, economic, and social structures; thus, the American forces had to withdraw from the war-stricken country on August 15, 2021.

The speedy advancement of Taliban forces in different provinces caused great shock not only among regional and international analysts but also among American and Afghan statesmen in early August last year.

Then, only 48 hours after the controversial escape of former Afghanistan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, different top officials met with him to discuss the fall of Herat Province on August 13, when all high-ranking officials accused each other on the situation and were shocked by soldiers’ refusal to fight Taliban forces.

Later, he announced in an interview that United States Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad divided all Afghan politicians.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued a report on the last days of previous Afghan government, quoting one of the then high-ranking Afghan officials as saying that nobody took defending capital Kabul seriously. On that day, president Ghani urged participants of the meeting to stop arguments and focus on approaching of Taliban to the capital city and he decided to address the nation in a video message that the Afghan government will resist to stop Taliban's advancement.

Ghani expected that Kabul can stand against Taliban in the next two weeks in order to pave the way for handing over the government smoothly, but Taliban advancement was not reversible.

The former Afghan officials also said on condition of anonymity that some top authorities were still of the thought that Taliban would not enter Kabul because they reached an agreement with the US to stop entering the capital until withdrawal of international forces, but Taliban violated its agreement and entered the city.

Afghanistan retreatment, a negative point in Biden’s record

David Reynolds Ignatius, prominent American journalist and analyst, wrote in The Washington Post on December 21, 2021, that the worst mistake of the Biden administration’s foreign policy was hazardous management of withdrawal from Afghanistan and that Biden wanted to end the longest US war, but the process was costly for the United States’ prestige.

Continuation of US wars

The New York Time reported on September 22, 2021, that Biden claimed that the war has come to an end, but the US wars are still going on.

In the last year’s UN General Assembly summit, Biden alleged that for the first time in the last 20 years, the United States was not involved in a war; however, in fact only one day before the speech, a US drone targeted a car in a remote road in northwestern Syria, and three weeks prior to that occasion, the US army attacked al-Shabab group in Somalia.

According to The New York Times, the US military forces might not be present in Afghanistan, but the US wars are still ravaging different parts of the world.

Biden sent a letter to the Congress in June, naming all countries where the US has military forces or continues military operation. According to the letter, there are 40k US troops in the Middle East. The president also acknowledged that the US Army is going to conduct future operation in Afghanistan against terrorist threats.

In fact, the US’s military decision-makers have found excuses to continue some operation in North Africa, Asia, and other places under the pretext of emergence of groups to affiliated Daesh.

One year after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden still seeks to fan the flame of the so-called war on terrorism in a bid to pave the way for saving his presidency and helping the Democrat Party to win in the upcoming congressional midterm elections; therefore, he announced on August 2 that the United States killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri on July 31, 2022.

It seems that the American statemen always link their government’s survival to warmongering policies around the world, and bitter experiences of historical failures could not stop their eagerness to embark on new conflicts.

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