Chaos Reigns

Lessons from Afghanistan

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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Just five years ago, the US abruptly left the scene of its crime of aggressive war in Afghanistan, the longest in its history but with the usual outcome, defeat. Americans attacked this small, backward, landlocked and poverty-stricken country to punish its rulers for harbouring the remnant al Qaeda mob who had “obliterated” New York’s World Trade Centre in September 2001. In fact, the Taliban had offered to find and hand over bin Laden and crew, whom they didn’t like, but their kind offer was rejected in favour of invasion. So, 20 years, $2trillion and 175,000 deaths after invading to remove the Taliban, the US left and the Taliban took over again. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It had nothing to do with finding bin Laden, it was all about getting rid of a government that wouldn’t do as it was told.

An editorial in this week’s The Economist (13.08.2026, paywall) bemoans the “vile” government in Afghanistan, pointing out that they mistreat and repress women, gays and anybody else they don’t like. As a result, but mainly because they defeated the US and its indescribably corrupt puppet “democratic” government, the forlorn country and its ragtag government are under punitive “sanctions” by the usual Western offenders. Afghanistan’s $4.2billion of foreign exchange remains frozen in a Swiss bank, most of its ministers can’t travel outside a few countries, foreign banks and investors can’t deal with them and so on but that hardly bothers the Talib rulers. They believe they don’t need Western approval to run their show, they don’t want swarms of corrupt mining companies stealing their assets and, unlike their predecessors, they have no intention of living it up in the fleshpots of Monaco or Las Vegas. Even by the very high bar of extremist Islamists, the current head of the Taliban is considered humourless, so stalemate. After agreeing that Afghanis are generally better off now than during the past 40 years of war, The Economist suggests a drastic move: “The Taliban are vile. Five years after America’s exit, the Afghan regime is not going anywhere ... So it is time for America and other democracies to hold their collective noses and talk to the Taliban.” That assumes the Taliban would want to talk to the people who devastated their country but there you are.

This region has an ancient and complex history. Modern Afghanistan began in 1919 when one of the local rulers declared an independent state, followed in 1926 when he proclaimed himself king. They muddled along until 1973 when the king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, was overthrown in a coup and a secular, leftist government took over. They forced a rapid modernisation including education for girls, land reform and so on, provoking violent opposition in the rural areas which soon became guerilla warfare, actively funded and supported by the American CIA. Their services included flying in a Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden to organise the extreme right wing religious mujahideen who refused to speak to infidels. OBL soon got them fighting the secular government instead of each other. The government asked the USSR to intervene, which became a major military expedition, leading to war, war and more war.

From the beginning, the American goal was to bog the USSR in an unwinnable war, their “Vietnam” as it was called at the time. This duly happened, the USSR teetered on bankruptcy so they withdrew then fell apart. Financed by sales of drugs which were flown to market by the CIA (see Whitney Webb for details, [1]), the mujahideen launched a vicious civil war against the urban liberal/leftist/Marxists in Kabul who responded in kind. While all this was going on, millions of Afghanis fled across the nearest border for safety until in 1996, a group of seminary students known as Taliban took over, mainly because they were organised and disciplined. A few years later, and unbeknown to the Taliban, Mr bin Laden achieved his dream of attacking The Great Satan, which launched yet another invasion that duly bogged them in an unwinnable war until they too teetered on bankruptcy and withdrew, allowing the Taliban to move back in.

Surely there’s a moral in this? Well, if there is, you won’t get it from reading The Economist. As far as they’re concerned, the West can do no wrong and the rest are never right. Similarly, the experts in international relations in the “offensive realism” school will tell you that the US was right to invade Afghanistan. In their view, international relations are anarchic and chaotic so, to ensure stability, the US had to exert dominance over the wild and unruly Pushtuns (as though nobody else had tried and failed). Except Afghanistan is about as remote from the US as it comes. In 1973, the US did no trade with that tiny, broke country, sold them no weapons or Big Macs, wasn’t trying to convert them from their traditional ways, nothing, so why did it matter to them when a left wing government took over? This is where offensive realism fails. The US did not get involved in that distant country to guarantee stability in Kansas, its goal was to prevent the USSR dominating a chaotic country on its most unstable border. If, the US reasoned, the fanatical mujahideen managed to export their brand of ultra-extremist religion to the Muslim regions in the USSR, so much the better.

It’s all about domination, this is all it’s ever about. The rest is propaganda. In a recent report, Mr Rubio, for example, has recently declared Cuba, a country of 5million impoverished people, to be an “existential threat” to the US, so the larger country has decided to strangle Cuba and force a change of government. Cuba is broke because of nearly 70 years of hostility, including economic and political “sanctions” applied to that tiny country but still the US won’t give up, per the report:

Cuba is the capital of 21^st Century communism, an anti-American espionage empire exporting revolution, committed to overthrowing the US by indoctrinating our youth and fomenting a racial revolution blah blah.

If Rubio believes Cuba can threaten the very existence of the US, he is overtly delusional. In fact, he doesn’t believe a word of it. He knows exactly what goes on there, he is simply lying. Was Iran ever a sufficient threat to the US to justify a preemptive attack? In no way. Was Venezuela ever a sufficient threat to the US to justify kidnapping its president? In no way. Libya? Well, yes, they were a threat in that Muammar Gaddafi had announced a plan to convert their oil sales to a gold-backed currency unit and had invited other oil producers to join, which interested them enough to talk to him. This threatened the petrodollar, which threatened the US bond market, which threatened US supremacy, so Mrs Gaddafi’s little boy had to learn the hard way that everything is connected. And at the core of it is the urge to dominate.

Domination is the name of the greatest human game of all. It is the most powerful game, the game the entire world can play, the most pervasive and persistent because it never wears off, and is the cause of practically all the trouble throughout our woeful history. Every fight is one person or one side trying to dominate the other. Each fight leads to a gleeful winner and a resentful loser, and sets up the next round because the urge to dominate is hard-wired into every one of us; if it loses a battle, it simply slinks back into its cave to glower for a while then, when things look peaceful, it sneaks out again and starts the same old same old: “Don’t let them get away with it, they cheated, you deserve more, they don’t deserve it, don’t let them think they can beat you, they don’t know how to use it, they’re inferior, they’re subhuman, let’s get ‘em!” We saw an example of this last week. Itamar ben Gvir, the Israeli minister for internal security, meaning police, prisons and others, called for the Israeli military to kill 30 to 40 Palestinians every day:

There are people there (Gaza) who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people. I’m doing them a favor by calling them people.

“Not even people.” He wasn’t exaggerating, this is what he believes, as do this zionist lawyer and Netanyuha’s personal rabbi. Ben Gvir believes: “We’re superior, you’re inferior, so we can do what we like but if you resist, we will destroy you.” This is precisely the attitude that is pushing the world to cataclysm. For example, the full production chain required to drop a single 2000lb bomb generates anything up to 100 tons of CO₂ per bomb, plus a heap of other toxic gases and chemicals. Factoring in the greenhouse gases required to build and run the radars, air bases, transport and all the rest is incalculable. Militarism is destroying the planet, and militarism is driven by the entirely optional urge to dominate. It is not a drive like breathing or finding food, it is something we think about and choose, and we are choosing the wrong path. However, Mr Rubio doesn’t stand in front of the microphones and cameras and say this. He twists the narrative so it’s everybody else’s fault, as in the opening sentences of his report:

For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States. It is a campaign that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.

There is not a word of truth in any of this, it is pure paranoid fantasy, a complete inversion of the historical record which shows: For nearly seven decades, the American regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against Cuba. The truth is that Rubio is power-hungry and will do or say anything to get votes. He knows perfectly well that Cuba is on its knees and he is determined to kick them as hard and often as he can because this plays well with the Cuban “refugee” community in Florida, which owns him. His parents left Cuba two years before the revolution in 1959. He was born in Florida in 1971, 14 years after they left, and has never been there.

After the revolution, practically the entire wealthy class took their money and left but even after 70 years, they still hate. These people live in a bubble vomiting poison against the poor students and peasants who overthrew the incompetent and corrupt Batista government all those years ago. Rubio got into the Senate on their vote so he tells them whatever they want to hear. There’s nothing so bad that they won’t believe, so he feeds it to them on the State Department letterhead. And it’s all built on hatred, the unquenchable hatred that comes from being turfed out of a high position in the dominance hierarchy and being forced to mix with the poor trash. They were rich and powerful in Cuba but, on landing in Miami, they soon found nobody wanted to know them. They had lost all their status, the ultimate humiliation.

The Cuban revolution, like all revolutions, didn’t happen because some nasty people woke one morning and decided to start chopping heads off. It had causes, all of which centred on poverty for the masses caused by the crime and corruption of the wealthy. Cuba was where the American mafia and all the other gangs parked their black money. Castro stopped the party by nationalising their casinos and hotels, so they will hate him and his party until rigor mortis sets in. Don’t worry that his new government immediately took steps to improve the standard of living for the average Cuban. If they’d been allowed to work on this and not divert so much of their resources to defend themselves (e.g. the opera bouffe Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961), Cuba would now have a standard of living equal to Spain. But the idea that 90 miles off the Florida coast lies a country that refuses to bend the knee drives the American power elite to the brink of insanity.

Is any of this rational? No, not at all, it is entirely biological, the US government functioning at the level of a pack of curs in the street snapping and snarling at each other to see who’s top dog. Let’s say they overthrow the Cuban government, which is entirely possible. How will that benefit the citizens of Great Bend, Kansas? It won’t, they won’t notice but their school wasn’t repaired this year because the money was spent on missiles to bomb Iran and a dozen other places. How will regime change benefit the citizens of Camaguey, Cuba? It won’t. On the track record of American “regime change” operations, life will suddenly get very much worse for most of them.

So where does all this leave us? In a bad place, that’s for sure, and rapidly getting worse because it is all evidence that the empire is crumbling. It has just lost a major war, as distinct from all the minor wars such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and so on, and is on the back foot in Ukraine. Financially, it is in serious trouble as it has had to bail out Japan due to the pressure on the yen caused by the blockade in Strait of Hormuz caused by the war it started with a country that wasn’t threatening it but had promised that if attacked, it would close the Strait ... You get the drift. Everything is connected.

The War Party in the US, meaning the entire political, financial, industrial, military, academic, religious and wealth establishments, have always believed they could do what they liked and there would be no repercussions. True, in the past, there weren’t any repercussions in the US, although there were plenty everywhere else. Now, they’re coming home. Lake Powell, the water supply for some 40million people in the hottest part of the country, is nearly empty as the snowpack on the Rockies is failing due to global warming. Farms are going bankrupt at record rates. Fertilisers aren’t available, so the crops will be down by half. Another ebola outbreak in Africa just when the US has decided it needs to divert its aid money to a $1.5trillion budget for weapons; on and on. All because small groups of people in most countries believe they are superior and should be dominant while the rest of the world should kneel down and accept subjugation (that man is seriously paranoid but very powerful).

The world is chaotic and anarchic just because humans want to dominate each other. It isn’t some metaphysical force driving us to the edge of the abyss, it is the result of a few percent of the population getting together to take control of the political process and push in a direction that excites them. They have no idea, they can’t see beyond the ends of their noses, they are simply greedy, stupid and evil people who get a kick out of crushing other people. If we don’t take control back, things will get worse and worse until we do. But by then it may be too late.

Reference:

1. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.