No Exit: CNN’s Propaganda War on Afghanistan’s Collapse

By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | May 2, 2025

I. From War to Withdrawal: The Empire’s Rewrite Begins

On April 30, 2025, CNN International aired a segment with host Becky Anderson, titled “Afghanistan’s Humanitarian Crisis Deepens as the U.S. Walks Away.” The headline alone tells you everything. This is the imperialist death ritual — the rewriting of history in real time. Not a word about occupation, destruction, or twenty years of war. Just a passive “walk away,” as if the U.S. left behind a neighbor’s barbecue, not a shattered nation bleeding under blockade.

Anderson’s segment follows a familiar liberal formula: highlight human suffering, invoke empathy, and then quietly erase the cause. She interviews aid workers, flashes images of starving children, and frames the entire situation as a tragedy of absence — as if the only problem is that the U.S. isn’t doing enough. The occupation is not condemned — it is forgotten. The war is not named — it is buried beneath empty appeals for humanitarian assistance.

It is only appropriate that the producer of this propaganda is CNN — the most trusted name in empire-friendly liberalism. The amplifier is Anderson herself, who has spent the past two decades laundering U.S. foreign policy through polished European civility. And the beneficiaries are many: U.S. foreign policy planners who want to close the book on their crimes, Beltway think tanks pushing for sanctions without accountability, and international NGOs who thrive off managing the very misery empire produces.

CNN’s framing is not a misstep. It’s strategic. It presents the humanitarian crisis as a natural disaster, not the direct result of imperial war, economic strangulation, and post-withdrawal sabotage. It invokes pity, not politics. It invites viewers to care, but not to understand. And in doing so, it shields the empire from responsibility while laying the ideological groundwork for future “humanitarian interventions.”

The segment also plays a sleight of hand: it obscures the timeline. There is no mention of the fact that after withdrawing its military forces, the U.S. froze billions in Afghan assets, imposed financial blockades, and openly supported regional warlords to destabilize any national consolidation of power. CNN speaks of collapse — but it never speaks of who pushed the building over.

This is not journalism. It’s ideological counterinsurgency. CNN isn’t just reporting on suffering — it’s repackaging imperial failure as innocent withdrawal. It’s transforming mass murder into policy fatigue. And behind Anderson’s carefully measured tone is a brutal message: the U.S. tried, the Afghans failed, and now it’s time to move on. But we won’t. Not without exposing the lie, naming the killers, and demanding revolutionary clarity in the face of imperial deceit.

II. A Grave Dug by Design: Crisis, Recalibration, and the Logic of Terror

CNN offers us images of a crumbling Afghanistan, but never the blueprint of collapse. So let’s lay it bare: this is not a humanitarian crisis — this is the predictable aftermath of imperialist warfare. From 2001 to 2021, Afghanistan was ground zero for the U.S. War on Terror — an open-ended, global war machine whose real purpose was not fighting terrorism but maintaining imperial dominance across energy corridors, Eurasian chokepoints, and strategic airspace.

The War on Terror wasn’t a war on al-Qaeda — it was a war on sovereignty. It was a decades-long project of technofascist domination, meant to remake the world into securitized zones of obedience. In Afghanistan, that meant partnering with warlords, flooding the economy with foreign aid tied to Western contractors, and constructing a puppet regime whose only stable institution was the U.S. military itself. When that military withdrew, the whole façade collapsed. It wasn’t sudden. It was engineered.

What CNN refuses to explain is that the so-called “collapse” was actually the next phase of imperial strategy. The withdrawal wasn’t a retreat — it was an imperialist recalibration. As the U.S. shifted its focus to confronting China and rearming NATO against Russia, Afghanistan was abandoned — but only after its economy was crippled, its assets frozen, and its infrastructure left gutted beyond repair. The goal wasn’t reconstruction. It was destabilization.

The $7 billion in Afghan central bank reserves frozen by the United States are not a footnote. They are economic warfare — the deliberate starvation of a nation punished for surviving without imperial permission. Add to that U.S.-backed sanctions, the collapse of remittance flows, and the defunding of critical aid programs — and you have a recipe for the very famine CNN now pretends to mourn.

Afghanistan also occupies a critical position in the broader geostrategic map. It is the geopolitical doorway between South and Central Asia — a landlocked chokepoint historically coveted by empires from the British Raj to the Soviet Union to the Pentagon. Controlling or breaking Afghanistan is key to disrupting Chinese infrastructure projects like the Belt and Road, severing Iranian land links to Asia, and undermining Eurasian regional cooperation. That’s why the U.S. didn’t just leave — it left chaos.

Even now, the CIA maintains covert assets in-country. The Taliban remains under constant threat of targeted destabilization. And Washington’s think tanks openly debate ways to use Afghanistan as a pressure valve on China’s western border. This is what CNN calls “walking away.” In reality, it’s imperialist sabotage by other means — a deliberate act of economic and political attrition, designed to ensure that Afghanistan can never again rise outside U.S. control.

III. From Terrorism to Terror: How Empire Manufactures Collapse, Then Weeps for It

The West loves to mourn its victims — after it kills them. CNN’s humanitarian hand-wringing over Afghanistan isn’t journalism. It’s crisis theater, designed to make imperial violence feel like divine misfortune. In this version of events, there are no perpetrators — just tragic outcomes, bureaucratic delays, and “unintended consequences.” But there was nothing unintended about what happened in Afghanistan. It was the culmination of U.S. imperial doctrine: use terror to destroy sovereignty, then cry crocodile tears over the rubble.

Let’s be crystal fucking clear: the U.S. didn’t fight terrorism in Afghanistan — it manufactured it. From empowering the Mujahideen in the 1980s, to creating a client regime riddled with corruption, to bombing civilians in the name of “counterinsurgency,” the U.S. turned Afghanistan into a laboratory of imperial domination. The Taliban was not a glitch. It was a byproduct — a force born in the vacuum created by occupation, betrayal, and the absolute failure of the puppet state propped up by Washington and NATO.

CNN wants us to see the Taliban as the sole source of Afghanistan’s suffering. But it was the U.S. that made hunger a weapon, that left the hospitals without medicine, that walked off with the gold reserves and slammed the door behind it. It is empire — not Islam, not culture, not incompetence — that orchestrated this disaster. The war may be over, but the occupation continues — through economic strangulation, diplomatic isolation, and the criminalization of recovery.

Even now, the Biden and Trump camps debate how to “contain” Afghanistan’s future. Not how to help, not how to repair — but how to ensure that nothing autonomous rises in its place. Humanitarian aid is conditioned. Investment is withheld. All while Western media outlets parade Afghan misery like war porn to justify future interventions. The message is clear: if we can’t rule you, we’ll ruin you.

And the worst part? CNN’s liberalism turns this systemic violence into a problem of compassion. As if the only failure was a lack of empathy. As if the solution is more aid, more NGOs, more grants — not revolutionary justice. This is the final insult: to convert structural genocide into a charity case, and to make imperialism look like an exhausted caretaker instead of a professional killer.

But the Afghan people know better. They’ve survived empires before. They’ve built resistance in the shadows of occupation. And the truth is this: their survival is not due to Western pity — it is in spite of it. Afghanistan is not a graveyard. It is a crime scene. And CNN is trying to mop up the blood with a press badge.

IV. No Exit, No Redemption: Empire Is the Crisis

Afghanistan is not a tragic exception. It is the rule. It is what happens when imperialism runs its course and then pretends to “walk away.” There is no redemption arc here. There is no failed policy that might’ve worked with better planning. What we are looking at — what CNN is trying to reframe as collapse — is the logical outcome of empire doing exactly what it was designed to do: destabilize, extract, destroy, and then disappear.

The U.S. did not “lose” Afghanistan. It bled it dry, prevented the emergence of an independent state, and pulled out once the strategic calculus shifted toward confronting China. That is imperial recalibration — not retreat. The goal was never to build a better Afghanistan. It was to ensure no one else could. And with the U.S. gone, Washington continues to sabotage from a distance — using sanctions, asset freezes, and diplomatic isolation to punish any attempt at sovereign recovery.

This is the real “War on Terror”: terror as a method of imperial governance. The drones were just the surface. The deeper logic was to condition the entire planet to the idea that empire has no end — only phases. First invasion. Then occupation. Then strangulation. And always, the same lie: that the U.S. meant well, tried hard, and just couldn’t save a savage land. But the truth is that the U.S. never brought order — it brought terror, in military uniform and economic disguise.

In the end, it is clear: Afghanistan is not in crisis because the U.S. left. It is in crisis because the U.S. came — and because it refuses to let go. Even now, the country is held hostage by a global financial system rigged by the very institutions that backed the war. The crisis is not in Kabul. It’s in Washington. It’s in the Pentagon, the IMF, the CIA, and the media empires that package imperial carnage as humanitarian concern.

To the people of the Global South: Afghanistan is your mirror. What was done there can and will be done elsewhere — unless we all organize to stop it. The same drone strikes that lit up Kandahar hover over Yemen, Gaza, the Sahel, and maybe tomorrow over Caracas, Tehran, or Lagos. This is not about Afghanistan alone. It is about the infrastructure of imperial power — and our human duty to dismantle it.

To those of us in the imperial core: don’t look away. Don’t be pacified by Anderson’s voice or moved to pity by CNN’s sanitized suffering. Be enraged. Be radicalized. Because if we cannot speak clearly about what happened in Afghanistan, we are not ready for what comes next. The empire hasn’t stopped. It has simply pivoted — to China, to Russia, to the next front. The war continues. And the time to resist is now.

Empire is the crisis. And the only exit is revolution.