Afghanistan Offers Lessons In Regime Change To Israel In Gaza
I talked to a lot of people in Afghanistan, where I reported about the fall 2001 U.S. invasion. Young or old, urban or rural, no matter their ethnicity, they all expected the victors to work miracles after the Taliban’s defeat.
“America will build roads, schools, buildings, everything.”
“Now Afghanistan will be beautiful.”
“We will have freedom! We will choose our new government.”
And after that? I asked. What will the U.S. do?
“They will leave,” people told me.
If only things were that simple, I remember thinking.
History is repeating itself in Gaza. A devastating surprise terrorist attack by Islamist extremists has again been followed by a ground invasion. Now the postwar scenario is being considered. It’ll either be the full-fledged ethnic cleansing centered around the expulsion of the Gazans, or regime change. Israel will have the victorious army, control over 2.3 million people (minus the 100,000 or 200,000 it will have killed) and it will soon face some of the same high expectations for reconstruction and the establishment of a post-Hamas government as the U.S. contended with after defeating the Taliban in 2001.
What form would a post-Hamas Gazan government take? “It might entail greater control for the Palestinian National Authority based in Ramallah, some sort of new local governance, governance under the tutelage of the Israeli military, or perhaps a coalition of Arab states,” Jon B. Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies speculated at the start of the war.
America’s approach to post-Taliban Afghanistan should serve as a case study of what Israel should not do if and when it topples Hamas. After the U.S. orchestrated the presidency of Hamid Karzai, he and his successor Ashraf Ghani were consistently viewed as weak and corrupt puppets installed by exploitative foreigners. Two decades, two thousand soldiers and two trillion dollars later, the U.S. found itself where it started, with the Taliban back in charge.
The seeds of America’s humiliating withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021 were planted by a few disastrous decisions by the Bush Administration in the months immediately following the collapse of the first Taliban regime in December 2001.
The Americans’ first major mistake took place at the Bonn Conference in November 2001, where they allowed the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance the highest number of delegates. The Northern Alliance was America’s ally in its war against the Taliban, but it only enjoyed the support of a tiny minority of Afghans, mostly in the remote mountainous northeast of the country and was the fervent enemy of the nation’s Pashtun majority. Accountable only to their American patrons, the Northern Alliance threw restraint to the wind, appointing warlords reputed for violence and corruption to cabinet positions and provincial governorships.
Members of the Taliban, whose government had controlled more than 90% of the country’s territory before 9/11, were excluded from public life under a misbegotten policy of “detalibanization.” Many fled across the Hindu Kush mountains to Pakistan as a result, biding their time as they organized Taliban 2.0.
Though telegenic and charismatic, Karzai—the man elected at Bonn as chairman of Afghanistan’s interim government—could not have been a worse choice. Though sold by the Tajiks leading the regime as a sop to his fellow Pashtuns, his close ties to the CIA and the fact that he had been living in exile on 9/11 added to the suspicion among Afghans that he had been parachuted in to serve as the country’s Philippe Pétain.
A traditional loya jirga tribal council convened in June 2002 in order to choose a permanent leader. Once again, the Taliban—by far the biggest ideological cohort—were excluded.
Making matters worse, Washington refused to let democracy, or Afghanistan’s traditional form of representative democracy, decide the future. When the exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, emerged as an early frontrunner as the figurehead of a potential unity coalition, the U.S. panicked. Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad clumsily buttonholed him behind the scenes until the humiliated former monarch agreed to withdraw from the race and endorse Bush’s choice, Karzai—at a U.S.-held press conference. “Together, these actions convinced many that the loya jirga is a puppet of [Northern Alliance] Panjshiris and foreigners, and that the Bush administration is not willing to let Afghans engage in any democratic debate that might contradict American views,” S. Frederick Starr and Marin J. Strmecki wrote in The New York Times on June 14, 2002.
The U.S.-backed Afghan government committed countless errors over its ensuing 19 years in power. Regardless of its performance, however, it never stood a chance of being considered legitimate after such dismal origins.
Like an individual, a regime only has one chance to make a good first impression. The Afghan debacle teaches Israel two important lessons about regime change, should it choose to impose a government upon Gaza. First, disenfranchising a substantial segment of the population will hobble Gaza’s next leadership, no matter how well-intentioned or democratic the process otherwise appears to be. Dehamasification would be as much of a disaster as detalibanization and debaathification in Iraq.
The other lesson is the most important: a democracy in which outsiders keep their thumb on the scale is an oxymoron. If—which I seriously doubt—Israel seeks to spread democracy to the occupied territories, it must let it play out organically and abide by the results no matter what—especially if they’re disagreeable.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Muslim Ban: Choose One
The swing state of Michigan will be in play next year, and many analysts predict that the Muslim diaspora in that state could prove pivotal. But which major candidate can they vote for? Donald Trump wears his Islamophobia on his sleeve with his repeated calls to limit Muslims from traveling to the US, as well as his loudly-declared support for Israel. Joe Biden, however, looks even worse as he declares “I am a Zionist” even after Israel wantonly slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza while barely giving Hamas a scratch. Choose your poison!
Linguistic Ethnic Cleansing
Supporters of Israel claim that, before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there was never a nation called Palestine or people called Palestinians. While the second statement is untrue, one wonders, even if this were true, how would that justify the colonial takeover and displacement of the people who lived there before?
DMZ America Podcast #127: GOP Debate, No Money for Ukraine or Israel, Pearl Harbor Day
Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) discuss the week in politics, culture and current events.
Four top contenders for the Republican nomination for president — Vivek Ramaswamy, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis — met for the fourth GOP debate of the current cycle. What, if anything, was the point of this exercise when Donald Trump clearly has the nomination wrapped up, as Ted and Scott pointed out many months ago?
For the first time in memory, Congress voted no to a major military spending package, this one for aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. What does the failure of Congress to rubberstamp proxy warfare say about the current state of partisanship in Congress and militarism in general?
Today was the anniversary of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack as well as the beginning of the third month after the October 7th Hamas attack against Israel. Ted and Scott discuss the nature of surprise attacks and their ability to traumatize a society and debate the importance of such benchmarks.
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:
DMZ America Podcast Ep 127 Sec 1: GOP Debate
DMZ America Podcast Ep 127 Sec 2: No Money for Ukraine or Israel
DMZ America Podcast Ep 127 Sec 3: Pearl Harbor Day
The Final Countdown – 12/6/23 – Israel Intensifies Gaza Attack Amid Move South
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed various current events, including federal prosecutors’ latest allegations against Trump pertaining to Jan. 6.
Some Help with Our Ethnic Cleansing, Please
One of the more tone-deaf talking points of Israel and its supporters is to accuse neighboring Arab states of being cruel to the Palestinians because they refuse to accept them as refugees. Setting aside the fact that countries like Egypt and Jordan already have millions of Palestinian exiles from previous wars, Israel is tacitly admitting that they are trying to impose ethnic cleansing against Palestinians. Like Germany before World War II, which demanded that other countries accept Jews, Israel wants to turn Arab states into collaborators.
The Final Countdown – 12/5/23 – Israel Intensifies Gaza Attack Amid Move South
On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed various topics from around the globe, including Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
The Final Countdown – 12/4/23 – House Republicans Ramp Up Campaign to Impeach Biden
Israel Has Crossed Its Rubicon
A few weeks ago, from an international and domestic-U.S. PR standpoint, Israel might have been able to bring its war in Gaza in for a hard landing. Now it has painted itself into a corner.
Gaza has been destroyed. By this time next year, so will Israel—not its physical plant, but its current status as a privileged, funded, protected nation-state.
The damage inflicted thus far is so severe and thorough that the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future, at least several years. All or most of its 2.3 million residents, transformed into refugees, will be permanently displaced.
Nothing can change that. If a left-wing Israeli government were to come to power, unilaterally end the war and offer the Palestinians their own sovereign independent republic side-by-side with Israel, Gaza would need to be rebuilt at a cost of tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. In the meantime, the Jewish state would have to provide long-term housing and public assistance for more than 2 million Palestinians throughout years of reconstruction. “You’ll end up having displaced people living in tents for a long time,” Raphael Cohen, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told the Associated Press. But where?
Assuming that a new regime could muster the necessary political consensus and address the ensuing security concerns surrounding a massive population of internally displaced people, Israel is a small nation of fewer than 10 million people with high unemployment and an aging population; it can’t afford such a massive undertaking or the demographics to quickly absorb 2 million traumatized Palestinians.
De facto, Gaza has been been ethnically cleansed. Gazans have been herded from the north, which has been flattened, to the south, against which IDF airstrike targeters and ground forces have recently turned their attention. The vast majority of the population of Gaza is now massed a few miles away from the Rafah border crossing to the Sinai Peninsula. All that remains is for the Israelis to expel the traumatized and radicalized Palestinians into the Egyptian desert.
More likely, Israel will open the gate. The Gazans enter the Sinai of their own accord. Where else can they go? There is no home to which they can return. This second Nakba will occur early next year.
Which will leave the ruins of Gaza desolate and dangerous. Spurred by legitimate public-health concerns, Israeli bulldozers will cart away the rubble and the tens of thousands of rotting corpses trapped underneath. Demining experts will have to find and disarm tens of thousands of unexploded bombs, a process that can require decades.
The end result: 141 square miles of prime beachfront property. Real-estate developers abhor nothing more than a vacuum along a scenic coastline. Sandals Gaza City will look smashing jammed next to Club Med Khan Yunis.
This was the thinking behind the Israeli intelligence officials who wrote a “thinking” memo that suggested that the situation be exploited as a rare opportunity to drive out all the locals so they could seize and annex the entire territory of Gaza. The revelations that Netanyahu’s government obtained Hamas’ detailed plans for the incursion a year ago, viewed a video on social media that showed Hamas fighters training for the horror through repeated drills inside a mocked-up kibbutz (jihadi culture requires those about to stage a raid to warn their enemy in advance), Egypt warned Israel that Hamas was about to attack days ahead in advance, and that the IDF failed to respond for at least eight hours after Hamas breached Israel’s high-tech “smart fence” around Gaza (despite receiving an instant alert) prompts the cynic in me to wonder whether the Israeli government let October 7th happen on purpose.
What, Netanyahu and his colleagues may have asked themselves, are a few hundred or even a few thousand Israeli lives compared to the chance to get rid of half the Palestinians in Palestine, and join Gaza to Israel in the bargain?
If so, they miscalculated. U.S. officials have conveyed to their Israeli counterparts that Israel only has a few weeks left before losing international support and suffering a “strategic defeat.” Israel plans to continue for months.
The U.S. assessment is too optimistic.
The die is cast. Defeat is inevitable.
Public opinion is trending in favor of Palestine against Israel. By this point next year an appalled world, including a huge majority of American voters, will have witnessed the abject misery and injustice of the forced displacement of more than 2 million innocent civilians. Oceans of tents in the desert, screaming orphans and wounded ex-Gazans will fill high-definition social media and broadcast screens day after disgusting day. Public support for Palestine, already at historically record levels, will be so overwhelming that governments everywhere will find the pressure impossible to ignore. It will no longer be just the usual suspects in the Arab world who issue formal protests. From Tokyo to Ottawa to Paris to Rome, it will be politically untenable for any government to allow itself to be seen as complicit with the most outrageous war crime since the Vietnam War.
Eventually, the U.S. will have to ghost Israel. No more emergency war packages, no more $4 billion a year in military and other foreign aid. Even under a second Trump Administration, we might recall our ambassador.
Israel can’t see it yet. But it is well on its way to international pariah status at a scale which apartheid-era South Africa, its close Cold War ally which also went too far, could never have imagined.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)