US suffers utter defeat in Afghanistan: Dennis Etler

The United States has been faced with “the utter defeat of its nearly twenty-year-old policy of occupation and control of Afghanistan,” says Dennis Etler, an American political analyst who has a decades-long interest in international affairs.

News ID: 449411

Date: 04 March 2020 - 11:43

RNA - On Sunday, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the US is leaving Afghanistan after two decades of "humiliation" following a so-called peace deal between the Taliban and the United States.

"US occupiers should've never invaded Afghanistan. But they did, and blamed everyone else for consequences," Zairf tweeted.

"Now after 19 years of humiliation, US has tendered its surrender," he added.

The foreign minister noted that US military presence has been a source of suffering for Afghanistan and other countries such Syria, Iraq and Yemen. "It will leave—while leaving huge mess behind.”

In an interview with Press TV on Tuesday, Etler, a former professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, said, “The US occupation of Afghanistan over the last nearly twenty years has been a gross violation of international law and the sovereignty of the Afghan nation. What we see now, what we're witnessing now, is the total defeat of the US policy. The US has finally given up the ghost so to speak and has acknowledged that its presence in Afghanistan is a futile endeavor.”

“It's most analogous actually to its experience in Vietnam where they eventually had to come to the realization that there was no exit other than to pick up and leave. There was no way of coming to some sort of compromise peace solution. That's what Trump seems to be aiming for but once the US leaves, if it does, according to the proposed timetable, there's no going back,” he stated.

“The US and its NATO allies will never be able to put the genie back in the bottle so to speak. Once they're gone that's it, they won't be able to go back, there would be such a popular and international resistance to the reintroduction of their troops into Afghanistan that it's inconceivable that they'd be able to pull that one off,” he said.

“So basically the genie, which is the Taliban, is out of the bottle. They will assume de facto control over Afghanistan. They may keep the Kabul regime in place as some sort of a cover, but as it stands now they have nearly complete control of the countryside and this is more of a formality than not that the US is signing off on, really without the direct involvement of the Kabul regime itself, showing how inept they are and how they lack any real credibility,” he noted.

“But again, as I say they might very well serve as a cover for the Taliban basically resuming control over Afghanistan. They might moderate their policy of course. The Salafist terrorist groups, in fact Takfiri terrorists like IS (Daesh) and Al Qaeda, they are really mortal enemies of the Taliban. They may have cooperated in some fashion in the past but they want to usurp what the Taliban have. I don't see where there's any natural alliance between them and so it's very much in keeping with the Taliban to say that they will resist the incursion of these other non-Afghani forces into the country. I mean, both IS (Daesh)   and Al Qaeda consist of foreign nationals, they don't have any real roots in Afghanistan so I’m sure the Taliban don’t want to see their influence extend throughout the country,” he said.

“So there is a commonality of interest you might say between the Taliban and the US, even though the US, of course, has supported both Al Qaeda and IS (Daesh) in order to serve its own purposes in the region. It’s a complex situation but as things stand it looks as if the US has been faced with the utter defeat of its nearly twenty-year-old policy of occupation and control of Afghanistan, so this is a great victory for the Afghani people as far as I'm concerned,” he concluded.

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