UK anti-war activist blames western intervention for current crisis in Afghanistan

London: The vice chair of UK non-profit Stop the War Coalition, Chris Nineham, on Tuesday blamed the US-led military intervention in Afghanistan for the current crisis in the Central Asian country where the Taliban (a terrorist group, outlawed in Russia) seized power following the withdrawal of the foreign troops.

“One thing that has to be recognized, and this is something that very few politicians in the West and none of the mainstream media are taking on board, is that the current catastrophe in Afghanistan is actually a product of the Western intervention, the Western invasion and occupation,” the anti-war activist told Sputnik.

Nineham stressed that this kind of military interventions always lead to the death of large number of people and the destruction of the infrastructure in the occupied country, so invaders are highly unpopular.

“This is what happen when you invade a foreign country. You are not popular, you create, apart from wide spread misery and destruction and carnage, a population that is very hostile to you,” he said, claiming that this is a “kind of clue” explaining what is happening now in Afghanistan after 20 years of military occupation by the US-led NATO coalition.

According to Nineham, the Taliban were able to regain power so quickly because being the only organization that fought the foreign invaders, they gained certain level of support among the population.

He also noted that none of the money that was pumped into Afghanistan over the last two decades ended up helping ordinary people because of rampant corruption within the Western-back government, so the Afghan authorities became “less and less legitimate in the eyes of the people.”

“Meanwhile, the bombings continued, the attacks continued, the torture camp at Bagram air base was in full operation, so no a surprise really that within a matter of years the Taliban was able to resurge and rebuild its force and begin to take on the occupiers,” he said.

Urging the West to learn lessons from this cycle of “disastrous wars,” the anti-war activist said the UK and the US governments should turn away from foreign interventions and adopt a foreign policy based on cooperation, diplomacy and negotiation, which Stop the War Coalition has been advocating for since the beginning of the war on terror.

“I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in the short term that our government is going to adopt that kind of approach, but we do have a very powerful anti-war opinion in this country and we’re going to do anything we can to try and to impose on them a much more sensible policy,” he said.

On Sunday, the Taliban completed their takeover of Afghanistan by entering Kabul. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani left the country to prevent what he described as bloodshed that would occur if militants had to fight for the city. The takeover resulted in many people currently trying to escape the country for fear of reprisals from the militants

UNI/SPUTNIK