Joe Biden never ended the US war on Afghanistan. After violating Trump’s withdrawal deadline with the Taliban for five months, a delay meant to help the US puppet government cling to power but which contributed to the disastrous final evacuation, Biden switched to economic warfare. All out, vicious, deadly warfare that continues the US killing spree that’s already taken 240,000 Afghan lives.

Once Biden finally ended the bombing and withdrew the last of the US troops propping up the government, a foreign creation never truly representative of the country, the corruption-plagued and resented regime collapsed in a matter of days under amazingly light military pressure by guys in the back of pick up trucks. Taliban fighters through tears of joy were incredulous how easy it was rolling into Kabul as the President fled. Incredulous means not believing it was really happening.

Therein lies a fundamental truth and lesson, of the idiot US invasion, backed 100% by Senate Foreign Affairs committee chair Joe Biden and all but one member of Congress (Barbara Lee, D-CA). It was all for nothing, an exact repeat of the Vietnam genocide which killed 3.8 million Vietnamese and ended in helicopter evacuations from the roof of the US embassy as nationalist-Communist forces moved into Saigon. As in Vietnam, the replacement governments the US installed never had the indigenous support they needed to govern the country without perpetual US military backing and warfare.

That truth can guide the future of US-Afghanistan relations but the geopolitical domination games the US ruling class and their leader-follower play are more important than historical lessons and rational foreign policy. They are putting Afghanistan and the US in danger as the future unfolds.

The day after the US’s Wizard of Oz government collapsed Biden confiscated $9 billion of the Central Bank of Afghanistan’s foreign dollar assets, which effectively cut the country off from many foreign banks and left the Taliban government unable to access its reserves and maintain the country’s cash flow. The grotesque theft equaled roughly 40 percent of the Afghan economy. Imagine China seizing trillions of our Federal Reserve Bank’s assets and plunging us into a depression.

The pretext? The Taliban’s human rights record, before they even formed their new government. Specifically, women’s rights.

“The people of Afghanistan are starving, and they are locked out of their funds,” says Naser Shahalemi, founder of End Afghan Starvation. “They cannot access their bank cards. They cannot access their bank accounts… because of the sanctions, they’ve been locked away from their own money…”

Biden, the supposed humanitarian, has plunged the country into perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, vying with Yemen (another US crime), the Congo, Somalia and Sudan.

Last fall UNICEF said “more than 23 million Afghans faced acute hunger, including 9 million who are nearly famished.” The World Food Program warned at the end of 2021 that 98 percent of Afghans were not getting enough to eat, with millions facing starvation. The UN estimated that by the middle of 2022, 97 percent of Afghans would be in poverty. While drought is contributing to the disaster, the immorality of our president is a major factor. It’s almost as if Biden’s team thought, “Hey, they’re in a drought. Let’s turn the screws even further.”

Unrelenting in his war against the Taliban, Biden refuses to release the funds, which economists say is the only way to restore liquidity to the country’s banks and ATMs, facilitate lending and economic growth, buy imports, especially food, and help finance the government, its healthcare and schools. In short, to revive the country’s economy, the poorest in the world. Yes, Biden is defunding the schools girls want to attend.

Faced with the humanitarian disaster he created, last winter Biden allowed humanitarian aid to flood into the country, some of it US, most UN, as long as it circumvents the Afghani government and is disbursed directly by humanitarian agencies, which prevented the mass starvation the country was headed into.

But it’s not enough and it’s not a substitute for a functioning banking system. The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said on Aug. 2 that “Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis remains dire, with 18.9 million people facing potentially life-threatening hunger and up to 6 million facing near-famine conditions.”

Yep, there’s still a US SIGAR, a holdover of the agency that monitored the $145 billion the US spent to rebuild what it was destroying over 20 years. Much of that money disappeared into corruption, another example of the utter stupidity of the smart people who control US foreign policy.

News reports out of Afghanistan are an outrage. Some parents have been forced to sell one of their children in order to feed their other children. Others have had to sell their own organ, or their children’s organs. A man in Herat sold his son’s kidney to pay creditors. Some girls are being sold into early marriage to buy food. A woman in deep debt sold her three-year old daughter to her creditor. The malnutrition ward at Kabul’s main children’s hospital has been full for months, with some babies sharing beds. “When we arrived in Kabul, there was no money left in the government accounts,” one father said, a result of Biden’s defunding of the Afghan government and its healthcare system.

Many Afghans have been forced out of their housing and into internal refugee camps by unemployment. Call them the Biden camps. Children from one camp, some as young as 4 or 5, are sent into Herat to shine shoes on street corners, making less than a dollar a day for their families to spend on food.

Some days there is no food and “the children scream from the hunger at night,” one man said. “Sometimes all we have is donated stale bread and tea. And when we run out of tea, I just gather grass to boil with the water.”

Surely you will agree that imposing mass starvation on the women of Afghanistan, and its men and children, to force women’s rights is barbaric. But this is Amerika. It’s also idiotic if you know certain facts which our brainwashing corporate media rarely acknowledge.

Afghanistan is probably the most culturally conservative, okay backward, country in the world. Perhaps a decade behind Saudi Arabia, which remains one of the most repressive countries, or even a decade ahead. Last May, the royal Saudi dictatorship conducted a mass execution of 81 people, some for “disrupting the social fabric and national cohesion” and “participating in and inciting sit-ins and protests.” Carried out in secret, a common method of capital punishment in the country is beheading. The Taliban haven’t beheaded anybody. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman authorized the murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s Turkish consulate after which he was dismembered with a bone saw. Despite some modernization, women in Saudi Arabia essentially are in conservatorships of their legally closest male. The entire female population is in lifelong Britney Spears status.

None of this stopped Joe Biden from traveling to Riyadh, selling the Saudis billions worth of weaponry and backing their invasion of Yemen.

The vast rural areas and small towns of Afghanistan are backward, much the way rural America is fundamentalist. Kabul is your more typical modern cosmopolitan big city, the fixation of US media, but it is an island in the country. Starvation aside, forcing western cultural notions of women’s roles in society goes against the grain of much of the population, including many women who feel safer and more secure in what appear to us to be restricted roles but can be considered liberating. A woman wearing a burka from head to toe doesn’t have to put up with dog whistling men. Somehow, and you know why, they’re never featured in all the interviews of the poor oppressed women of Kabul. The US has no more right to impose its culture on Afghanistan than Iran has to invade us, take over Washington and impose shariah law. It violates the prime directive of Star Trek.

To force the Taliban to impose women’s rights on the conservative population would put them in the same position as if Iran forced the US to ban all abortion. It would cause all sorts of new problems. But hark, just as Afghanistan is culturally divided, so are the Taliban. There is a split amongst the Taliban between the pragmatist and “modernizer” administrators in Kabul and the religious shura council in Kandahar led by Haibatullah Akhunzada, the amir of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s version of Ayatollah Khameni. In fact, last March the Taliban’s education council in Kabul decided to admit all girls to the high schools. The girls are already allowed in grade school, private secondary schools and some university programs. But the final decision rested with the Kandahar council, which itself was divided on the issue. The shura decrees by consensus, unlike the US majority rule, given that the five Supreme Court justices who just reinstated compulsory childbirth are Catholics.

Lacking consensus, girls can’t go to high school, for now. Which gets us to a very interesting incident. In 2016, President Obama assassinated the Taliban’s amir, Akhtar Mansour in a drone strike. Mansour was somewhat modern by Taliban standards, but was replaced by the backward hardliner Akhunzada. “If he was still alive, we wouldn’t be stuck on the girls’ school issue,” a Taliban diplomat told the NYT.

Following the same violent self-defeating playbook, Biden assassinated Ayman al-Zawahri, the head of Al Qaeda, in a drone strike on his second floor balcony. The attack in Kabul terrorized the city and enraged many. Imagine Iran launching a drone into Washington D.C. to kill Kamala Harris in retaliation for Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the second most powerful official in Iran. Some Afghan and American analysts think the drone strike may harden Taliban attitudes and push the regime toward an open embrace of the extremist forces it pledged to renounce in its 2020 peace deal with the United States. According to reports, much of the Taliban leadership was surprised Zawahri was living in Kabul and his house may have been provided by the more militant Haqqani faction of the Taliban.

“The Taliban are in deep political trouble now, and they are going to face pressure to retaliate. The relationship they have with al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups remains very strong,” said Asfandyar Mir, an expert on Islamic extremism at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. “I think we should brace for impact.”

Which gets me back to the fundamental truth about the US and Afghanistan, the house-of-cards collapse of the US-created government. The Taliban faced down the world’s superpower for 20 years of vicious, $2 trillion warfare and won. They had consolidated the nationwide resistance to the imperial invader. No other movement did. Not Al Qaeda or Islamic State. It wasn’t “democratic” but neither was the US invasion and its corruption plagued pseudo-democratic regime. But I’m a realist. The Taliban proved themselves the only government of Afghanistan. The US ruling elite needs to recognize that.

That doesn’t mean we should immediately establish diplomatic relations. It takes some time for war wounds to heal, especially given the trauma caused by 911, about which an essential point must be made.

The US should never have invaded Afghanistan. While a few thousand Al Qaeda fighters were based in Afghanistan, 911 was a covert operation planned by only a handful of Al Qaeda. Over 99% of its fighters did not know about the operation, which was carried out by the 20 hijackers and a handful of men providing logistical support, most, if not all of whom probably did not know the real goal of the plan. That’s how special ops work, the teams carrying them out are compartmentalized, one member not knowing what the others roles are, having only a bit part. The less people who know the big picture, the less likely someone will leak. I doubt that most of the hijackers themselves knew the end game, lest one of them facing suicide back out and talk. They may have been told they would take hostages and negotiate a flight to safety.

Certainly the Taliban leadership had zero knowledge of the plan. After the attack they agreed to turn bin Laden over to a third party for trial if the US provided probable cause, which George Bush refused. Blaming and overthrowing the Taliban was a pretext to establish a US bases on Iran’s, Iraq’s and Russia’s borders, a cog in the US global empire.

All the US needed to do was send special ops teams of its own to track down the surviving dozen or so plotters, put them on trial or assassinate them if that is your preference, not kill 240,000 Afghanis.

The leap from a handful of Al Qaeda “SEALS” to a full-scale invasion of occupation of the country was nonsensical. To cite one example, after Obama and NATO carpet bombed Libya and deposed Khadafi, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State exploited the vacuum and established bases. At one point Benghazi was the Islamic State’s capital. Should we re-invade Libya? Or any of the other countries where Al Qaeda now operates?

Which gets us to the present. Biden’s sanctions should never have been levied, let alone using mass starvation as foreign policy. The stolen $9 billion needs to be returned and all other sanctions lifted. That would end the humanitarian catastrophe and begin an era of cooperation with the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

The US needs to stabilize Afghanistan. One of the stupidities of Biden’s policy is attempting to incite the overthrow of the government. The only rival to the Taliban, organizing to exploit any unrest, is the more radical, Saudi-Wahabbist Islamic State, which is demanding the Taliban retaliate for Biden’s Kabul strike, with some popular support. As with Iraq, the US is energizing IS in Afghanistan. If Biden hadn’t launched humanitarian warfare, fired a drone into the country’s capital and was instead working with the Taliban, they might have discretely moved him out of the country and perhaps into the hands of the US for trial or worse.

The US has an interest in deflecting Al Qaeda away from US targets and a path to diplomatic relations could lead to US encouragement and support for Taliban efforts to contain the two jihadist movements still present in Afghanistan, both of which are rivals for power. The same goes for women’s rights in Afghanistan. A carrot approach would strengthen the Kabul moderates and hasten modernization. Mass starvation is not just immoral, it’s backfiring.