Human Rights Watch says the Afghan government has not adequately investigated the attack nor has it investigated the killings of journalists, human rights activists, clerics, and judicial workers that began escalating after the Afghan government began peace talks with the Taliban in April.
Yet, unquestionably, the warring party in Afghanistan with the most sophisticated weapons and seemingly endless access to funds has been the United States. Funds were spent not to lift Afghans to a place of security from which they might have worked to moderate Taliban rule, but to further frustrate them, beating down their hopes of future participatory governance with 20 years of war and brutal impoverishment. The war has been a prelude to the United States' inevitable retreat and the return of a possibly more enraged and dysfunctional Taliban to rule over a shattered population.
The troop withdrawal negotiated by President Joe Biden and U.S. military officials is not a peace agreement. Rather, it signals the end of an occupation resulting from an unlawful invasion, and while troops are leaving, the Biden Administration is already laying plans for "over the horizon" drone surveillance, drone strikes, and "manned" aircraft strikes which could exacerbate and prolong the war.
We should be sorry that, during 2013, when the United States spent an average of $2 million per soldier, per year, stationed in Afghanistan, the number of Afghan children suffering malnutrition rose by 50 percent. At that same time, the cost of adding iodized salt to an Afghan child's diet to help reduce risks of brain damage caused by hunger would have been five cents per child per year.
We should deeply regret that while the United States constructed sprawling military bases in Kabul, populations in refugee camps soared. During harsh winter months, people desperate for warmth in a Kabul refugee camp would burn -- and then have to breathe -- plastic. Trucks laden with food, fuel, water, and supplies constantly entered the U.S. military base immediately across the road from this camp.
We should acknowledge, with shame, that U.S. contractors signed deals to build hospitals and schools which were later determined to be ghost hospitals and ghost schools, places that never even existed.
On October 3, 2015, when only one hospital served vast numbers of people in the Kunduz province, the U.S. Air Force bombed the hospital at 15-minute intervals for one and a half hours, killing 42 people, including 13 staff, three of whom were doctors. This attack helped greenlight the war crime of bombing hospitals all around the world.
More recently, in 2019, migrant workers in Nangarhar were attacked when a drone fired missiles into their overnight camp. The owner of a pine nut forest had hired the laborers, including children, to harvest the pine nuts, and he notified officials ahead of time, hoping to avoid any confusion. Thirty of the workers were killed while they were resting after an exhausting day of work. Over 40 people were badly wounded.
U.S. repentance for a regime of attacks by weaponized drones, conducted in Afghanistan and worldwide, along with sorrow for the countless civilians killed, should lead to deep appreciation for Daniel Hale, a drone whistleblower who exposed the widespread and indiscriminate murder of civilians.
Between January 2012 and February 2013, according to an article in The Intercept, these air strikes "killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in air strikes were not the intended targets."
Under the Espionage Act, Hale faces 10 years in prison at his July 27 sentencing.
We should be sorry for night raids that terrified civilians, assassinated innocent people, and were later acknowledged to have been based on faulty information.
We must reckon with how little attention our elected officials ever paid to the quadrennial "Special Inspector General on Afghan Reconstruction" reports which detailed many years' worth of fraud, corruption, human rights violations and failure to achieve stated goals related to counter-narcotics or confronting corrupt structures.
We should say we're sorry, we're so very sorry, for pretending to stay in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons, when, honestly, we understood next to nothing about humanitarian concerns of women and children in Afghanistan.
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