On August 15, almost twenty years after it was launched with the invasion of Afghanistan, another destructive U.S.-led war of conquest came to an abrupt, humiliating end. Throughout the day military helicopters flew back and forth airlifting “diplomats” and assorted agents from the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul to the airport to be put on flights out of the country. Locals who collaborated with the occupiers were abandoned to their fate, their desperate pleas to be evacuated ignored. Some clung to the side of a U.S. military aircraft as it taxied on the runway, with at least two falling to their death when the plane was in the air. The body of another was later found in the plane’s landing gear.

Canada, which withdrew all its troops seven years ago, but has continued to support the project of re-making Afghanistan in the neo-liberal image of the occupiers, scrambled to shut down its embassy and evacuate its personnel, as did other countries that were part of the U.S. “coalition.”

It has not been lost on anyone how similar the frantic U.S. evacuation from Kabul is to its chaotic exit from Saigon in 1975 when its puppet regime in south Vietnam collapsed, signaling the defeat of its war of aggression and Vietnam’s liberation. In Afghanistan, the U.S. puppet regime surrendered without a fight once Taliban fighters entered Kabul after taking one province after another and all the country’s principal cities in a matter of days, meeting very little resistance from the 300,000-strong U.S./NATO-funded, trained and equipped security forces. The speed with which it all took place allegedly left Biden “stunned.” The U.S. and other members of NATO were at the time engaged in pulling out the last of their troops in keeping with a deal that called for them all to be out by August 31 as agreed by Taliban leaders and the former Trump administration.

As the news broke of Kabul’s fall and that President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country there were attempts in NATO circles to explain what happened. Some spoke of “miscalculations” of the occupying powers and “the international community.” The U.S. Department of Defense pinned blame on their Afghan protégés. A Pentagon spokesperson stated, “You can resource, you can train, you can support, you can advise, you can assist. You cannot buy will, you cannot purchase leadership, and leadership was missing.”

The spokesman for the Taliban’s political office, Mohammad Naeem, told Al Jazeera that the war was over. He said the Taliban had achieved what they were seeking: “the freedom of our country and the independence of our people.” He said they wanted peaceful relations with other countries and would not allow anyone to use the country to target anyone. “We do not think that foreign forces will repeat their failed experience in Afghanistan once again,” he said. He emphasized that the Taliban wanted a peaceful transition of power and would provide safety for citizens and diplomatic missions. He also said the rights of women and minorities would be respected.

Another spokesman said the aim was to form an “open, inclusive Islamic government.” Yet another said the speed with which they were able to advance as the U.S. and NATO pulled their troops out showed that the Taliban were accepted by the Afghan people.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first comments on the events of August 15 projected a very different image. He said Canada condemned the “escalating violence,” and was “heartbroken” at the situation the Afghan people found themselves in, given the sacrifices made by Canadians who believed, and continue to believe, in the future of Afghanistan. Then, without a trace of irony, he added that Canada would continue to work with “allies and the international community” to ensure those brutal, neo-colonial efforts were not in vain.

Stinging Defeat for Canada’s Foreign Policy and the “Rules-Based International Order”

Whatever spin Trudeau may try to put on it, the defeat of the U.S./NATO aggressors in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban is very much a defeat for the Trudeau government and the policy of successive governments to appease the U.S. warmongers by joining or supporting their dirty wars against nations and peoples that have done Canada and Canadians no harm. These illegal wars of aggression have always been based on lies, as are other acts of war including economic “sanctions” against countries that do not submit to U.S./NATO dictate. The war in Afghanistan was no exception.

Canada like other NATO members was dragged into the U.S. “war on terror” in Afghanistan based on the lie that the U.S. was acting in self-defence. NATO’s Atlantic Council asserted, without evidence, one day after the terrorist attack on the twin towers and Pentagon, that the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan was responsible and had to be taken out by force. NATO’s Article 5 that states that an attack on any of its members is an attack on all of them, requiring collective defence, was quickly invoked to get other members of the alliance to join the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. The same false claim of self-defence was used to get the UN Security Council to go along with NATO’s violation of the Charter of the United Nations, which the Security Council is duty-bound to uphold, regarding what does and does not constitute self-defence.

This is the “rules-based international order” in action that the U.S. and Canada are pushing in opposition to the rule of law and the UN Charter. The U.S. makes the rules, decides who is breaking them, and how they should be punished.

The war’s toll in terms of lives lost and ruined and the destruction wrought by years of merciless and indiscriminate bombing by the U.S./NATO coalition gives the lie to everything Canadians were told the war was about: bringing freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law, security and development to Afghanistan, and upholding the rights of women and girls.

Brown University’s Cost of War project estimates that up to April 2021 over 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians had died as a direct result of the war. This is in addition to the official count which includes 125,000 combatants on all sides, aid workers and journalists. It does not include all those wounded and left with permanent injuries, the millions displaced from their homes and turned into refugees, those tortured and detained for years without trial in hell-holes like the U.S. prison in Guantánamo, and others condemned to civil death using draconian “anti-terrorism” laws and, in Canada, security certificates. There were 165 Canadians, including seven civilians, who died in the war. Many more of the 40,000 troops who were deployed to Afghanistan were wounded, both physically and psychologically, leading to many veterans taking their own lives.

Let the experience of Afghanistan serve as a lesson about the folly of magical thinking that Canada “benefits” from being an integrated part of the U.S. war machine. How are Canadians served by having their governments interfere in the affairs of sovereign peoples around the world, engaging in coercive measures of all types aimed at forcing regime change in their countries? How do Canadians benefit from military interventions against those targeted at any given time as enemies of the U.S. and the “free world” it claims to lead? The people of the U.S., Canada and other countries are never consulted and have no say when governments claiming to represent them decide to embroil their countries in war as part of NATO or some other U.S.-assembled coalition. How have the people of Venezuela or Haiti or Nicaragua been helped by Canada’s operation as a gendarme, or a good cop to the U.S. bad cop, as part of an effort to prevent them from exercising their democratic will by electing governments of their own choosing? Canada is failing to get the results it seeks in those places as the people act to defend their independence and their own nation-building projects. If Canada remains on this road of appeasing the U.S. and its illegitimate wars it will continue to fail, just as it has in Afghanistan, whether Trudeau or any of those seeking to replace him as prime minister want to admit it or not.

Canada’s Foreign Policy Is an Election Issue

The time is now to step up the work to demand Canada get out of NATO and the U.S. war machine so that instead of interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries and peoples it can become a genuine factor for peace. What better time than during a federal election, and in view of the events in Afghanistan, for Canadians to discuss the need for a new direction for Canada’s foreign policy and for a government that renounces war and aggression as tools of its foreign policy, and how such a government can be brought into being.

Let’s put on our agenda finding ways to turn Canadians’ aspirations for peace and relations among the world’s peoples based on equality, mutual respect and mutual benefit into reality!

(With files from CBC, AP, Al Jazeera, The Wire, Politico)