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Consider it strangely (in)appropriate that, among the things Donald Trump and Joe Biden hardly discussed (including climate change) at their debate, they did face off over" yes, Afghanistan! You remember Afghanistan, right? Biden said that Trump "didn't do anything about that," and Trump, in his usual incoherently hyperbolic fashion, responded, "He was so bad with Afghanistan. It was such a horrible embarrassment. Most embarrassing moment in the history of our country that when Putin watched that and he saw the incompetence" No general got fired for the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan, where we left billions of dollars of equipment behind. We lost 13 beautiful soldiers and 38 soldiers were obliterated." To which Biden replied, "You ever heard so much malarkey in my whole life?"
Uh" Do you even remember Afghanistan? You know, the land George W. Bush and crew invaded soon after the 9/11 attacks; the place this country's military then fought in until, just short of 20 -- yes, 20! -- years later, when, as the Taliban won ever more victories and the Afghan military that the U.S. had trained began to collapse, the Trump administration launched a chaotic process of not-quite-withdrawal, all too fitting for that disaster of a war that Joe Biden ended with the deaths of those 13 U.S. troops and (as ever) untold numbers of Afghans. It was, in truth, a horrifically appropriate conclusion to the first of America's terrifyingly and terrorizingly disastrous wars on terror.
And now, in some eerie sense, you might consider the Afghan war -- in fact, all of America's wars on terror -- to be coming home to roost in a genuinely disturbing fashion, thanks in significant part to the man whom TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino labels the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse -- and yes, there is something potentially apocalyptic about this bump stock of a moment in America. Tom
War and Famine
America's War on Terror and the Wasting of Our Democracy
Many war stories end with hunger wreaking havoc on significant portions of a population. In Christian theology, the Biblical "four horses of the apocalypse," believed by many in early modern Europe to presage the end of the world, symbolized invasion, armed conflict, and famine followed by death. They suggest the degree to which people have long recognized how violence causes starvation. Armed conflict disrupts food supplies as warring factions divert resources to arms production and their militaries while destroying the kinds of infrastructure that enable societies to feed themselves. Governments, too, sometimes use starvation as a weapon of war. (Sound familiar? I'm not going to point fingers here because most of us can undoubtedly recall recent examples.)
As someone who has studied Russian culture and history for decades, I think of Nazi Germany's nearly three-year siege of the city of Leningrad, which stands out for the estimated 630,000 people the Germans killed slowly and intentionally thanks to starvation and related causes. Those few Russians I know who survived that war as young children still live with psychological trauma, stunted growth, and gastrointestinal problems. Their struggles, even in old age, are a constant reminder to me of war's ripple effects over time. Some 20-25 million people died from starvation in World War II, including many millions in Asia. In fact, some scholars believe that hunger was the primary cause of death in that war.
We've been taught since childhood that war is mainly about troops fighting, no matter that we live in a world in which most military funding actually has little to do with people. Instead, war treasure chests go disproportionately into arms production rather than troops and (more importantly) their wider communities at home. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons are being developed with little or no ethical oversight or regulation, potentially removing many soldiers from future battlefields but not from the disastrous psychological scars of war. Meanwhile, in war zones themselves, among civilians, the long-term effects of armed conflict play out on the bodies of those with the least say over whether or not we go to war to begin with, its indirect costs including the possibility of long-term starvation (now increasingly rampant in Gaza).
Today, armed conflict is the most significant cause of hunger. According to the United Nations' World Food Program, 70% of the inhabitants of war- or violence-affected regions don't get enough to eat, although our global interconnectedness means that none of us are immune from high food, fuel, and fertilizer prices and war's supply-chain interruptions. Americans have experienced the impact of Ukraine's war when it comes to fuel and grain prices, but in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, which depend significantly on Eastern European foodstuffs and fuel, the conflict has sparked widespread hunger. Consider it a particularly cruel feature of modern warfare that people who may not even know about wars being fought elsewhere can still end up bearing the wounds on their bodies.
America's Post-9/11 Forever Wars
As one of the co-founders of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, I often think about the largely unrecognized but far-reaching impact of America's post-9/11 war on terror (still playing out in dozens of countries around the world). Most of the college students who made news this spring protesting U.S. support for Israel's war in Gaza hadn't even been born when, after the 9/11 attacks, this country first embarked on our decades-long forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and all too many other places. By our count at the Costs of War Project, those wars directly killed nearly one million people in combat, including some 432,000 civilians (and still counting!), and indirectly millions more.
Our forever wars began long before local journalists in war zones first started to post bombings and so many other gruesome visions of the costs of war, including starvation, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media sites, as they did during the first days of the Russian bombing of Kyiv and, as I write, Israel's seemingly never-ending assault on Gaza. Those journalists haven't been fettered by the U.S. military's embed programs, which initially hamstrung war reporters trying to offer anything but a sanitized version of the war on terror. In other words, Americans have, at least recently, been able to witness the crimes and horrors other militaries commit in their war zones (just not our own).
And yet the human rights violations and destruction of infrastructure from the all-American war on terror were every bit as impactful as what's now playing out before our eyes. We just didn't see the destruction or slow-motion degradation of roads and bridges over which food was distributed; the drone attacks that killed Afghan farmers; the slow contamination of agriculture in war zones thanks, in part, to American missiles and rockets; the sewage runoff from U.S. bases; the bombings in everyday areas like crowded Iraqi marketplaces that made grocery shopping a potentially deadly affair; and the displacement and impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis because of U.S.-led drone attacks -- to take just a few of so many examples. Of course, these aren't problems as easily captured in a single picture, no less a video, as hospitals full of starving children or the flattened cities of the Gaza Strip.
America's longest war in Afghanistan deepened that country's poverty, decimating what existed of its agriculture and food distribution systems, while displacing millions. And the effects continue: 92% of Afghans are still food insecure and nearly 3 in 10 Afghan children will face acute malnutrition this year.
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