Unpack humanitarian intervention.
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GET EDUCATED
By Andrew Lee (he/him)
An image of a U.S. Marine cradling an Afghan baby went viral last week (Business Insider). Alongside pictures of desperate families pressed up against razor-wire fencing, it is one of the most striking visuals of a calamitous American retreat (The Guardian). Americans saw these horrifying images alongside articles analyzing the dire prospects for Afghan women (Newsweek) and LGBTQ+ people (BBC), increasing pressure on Biden to extend an August 31 evacuation deadline (MSN). The United States harmed civilians in a 20-year occupation and then abandoned them in its evacuation. To refuse civilians and their children would be a moral catastrophe, but plunging a nation into civil war with devastating civilian casualties is already the opposite of humanitarianism.
In 2001, 80% of Americans supported invading Afghanistan (Gallup). In recent years, Afghanistan faded from front-page news. This May, Americans largely felt the war was no longer a “hot-button issue,” with a plurality in favor of withdrawing troops (Gallup). In July, only 46% of Americans felt the invasion and occupation wasn’t a mistake (Gallup). But pictures of soldiers with babies circulating along with a newfound concern for Afghan civil rights caused support for the withdrawal to plummet (Yahoo News). Though accepting adult refugees remains controversial (Media Matters), many clamor to adopt refugee children (Today). Admitting Afghan children, if not their parents, might suggest the war truly was a humanitarian intervention.
In reality, the American government had its own reasons for its invasion of Afghanistan twenty years ago (Common Dreams, Small Wars Journal) and the admittance of children today. This use of children to justify war is personal to me as someone adopted from Korea, a country which likewise started sending children to the U.S. after an American occupation and war. Countries that send children to the United States are often in tatters as a result of the American government’s actions. During the Korean War, American forces deforested nearly the entire peninsula with napalm (Truthout). Some women survived by having sexual relations with American occupying forces. Their mixed-race children were the first Korean American adoptees (USA Today).
This created “a paternal attitude between Korea and the US where white Americans rescued Asian orphans, while concealing the US responsibility in the Korean War” (University of Minnesota). Adoption from South Korea is one of the ways in which “the war lives on as a material fact” (The New Inquiry). White America has long used adoption to “civilize” “savage” children of color (Twitter) while obscuring its role in creating the conditions that force desperate parents to give up their children in the first place. Today, the Biden administration continues to maintain family separation policies (Phoenix New Times) that break up families who cross the U.S.-Mexico border while thousands of “unaccompanied minors” are incarcerated in Border Patrol jails (Fox 10). The United States government isn’t a selfless benefactor for Korean, Central American, or Afghan children.
The U.S. government justified its invasion of Afghanistan as retribution for 9/11 but also, paradoxically, a war to liberate Afghan women from gender oppression. But the United Nations estimated 100,000 Afghans (NBC News), the equivalent half the population of Salt Lake City, were injured, maimed, or killed, often by the American military (Democracy Now, New Yorker).
All of this begs the question: if the protection of Afghan women, children, and sexual and gender minorities was the reason for the occupation, where was this concern before? Where was it when U.S. airstrikes were levelling neighborhoods earlier this month? Did the CIA ask whether detainees were part of the LGBTQ+ community before torturing them in black sites (IBT)? Was the U.S. government concerned with the well-being of children as it extrajudicially murdered their parents (Human RIghts Watch)? There is no such thing as a humanitarian war. Governments wage war to protect their own interests. There is never anything humane about mass death. One does not have to endorse all — or any — of the actions of a foreign government to oppose bombing its citizens “back to the Stone Age” (History News Network). To claim that destroying a country is a charitable act on behalf of that country’s most marginalized members is depraved.
Children cut off from their families and cultures in the wake of war are not a political symbol but a human tragedy. The U.S. is complicit in the splintering of families, not their savior. Our government has a responsibility to resolve the harm we’ve caused.
Key Takeaways
The U.S. military committed numerous human rights abuses during a fruitless occupation of Afghanistan that plunged the country into civil war.
The “humanitarian” adoption of children has long been used to whitewash brutality.
The U.S. responsibility to Afghan people comes not from its benevolence but its role in destabilizing the country.
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