What Afghanistan’s Saigon moment teaches us about America’s humanitarian wars

What we’ve just witnessed in Afghanistan is a historical repeat of the ‘Saigon moment’. But the final hours of the US occupation have been accompanied by a cacophony of neocons decrying the decision to end the war.

They cite women’s rights, regional stability and anti-terrorism as reasons the US should have remained in Afghanistan. But those were the very reasons cited for starting the war in the first place, back in 2001. How many more decades do they expect the world to be held hostage to the narratives of ‘the humanitarian war’? It’s now, at the end of the US’s longest war, that we must reflect on the past 20 years, and consider how it was that those false “humanitarian” narratives led us to this point.

Some of the most grave human rights violations occurred at the very onset of the war.

In the first months, the US dropped thousands of yellow cluster bombs around Afghan villages. They resembled aid packages – also yellow. Children would rush to collect what they believed to be food, only to end up dead after picking up and setting off an explosive device.

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