As expected, the remnants of Washington’s of War Party and its political-media echo chamber have been sounding apocalyptic in response to President Joe Biden’s decision to get U.S. troops out from Afghanistan after staying there for twenty years.
They admit that things Afghanistan have not been working as planned, but then getting out of Hindu-Kush would spell U.S. DEFEAT, an at the minimum the loss of America’s credibilityaround the world, marking a victory for Iran, Russia, China and all the other bad guys who would be now filling the geo-strategic “vacuum” created by American withdrawal.
Or as the Fifth Law of Thermodynamics, spelled by neo-conservative scientists outs it, Entropy or a state associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty, which result from the decrease in U.S. military power, could lead to a devastating global disequilibrium.
Hey, it would be nothing less than a rerun of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, with helicopters on the American embassy’s roof in Kabul. Consider the potential threat to the Afghani secularists, women, religious minorities, and of the realistic scenario under which the failed state of Afghanistan degenerates into a total anarchy and is engulfed in a bloody civil war between ethnic and tribal groups. That in turn could draw in the neighbouring foreign powers and ignite a (nuclear?) war between India and Pakistan, and the end of the world as we know it.
By drawing-up these nightmare scenarios we tend to forget how it all started in October 2001 when former U.S. President George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan which was seen as appropriate response to the September terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and as part of an effort to dismantle the al-Qaeda group that carried those attacks and deny it safe base of operations in Afghanistan by removing the Islamist Taliban organization from power.
The expectation in America and worldwide was that after capturing Obama bin Laden and the other members of his murderous gang and deposing the Taliban that had offered it a refuge, the U.S. would hand power to a new government that would commit itself to fighting terrorism. It would then withdraw from Afghanistan while perhaps leaving a small number of military advisors to help assist the new leaders in Kabul.
In any case, dropping those infamous “Daisy Cutters” aka the Mother of all Bombs on Afghanistan was supposed to send a clear message to future leader is Kabul: If you have ever decide again to play host to anti-American terrorists we would flatten Afghanistan -- who had yet to enter into the modern era -- into the stone age.
Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan proposed an appropriate ending to the war in Afghanistan. Recalling the 1967 capture of communist guerrilla leader Che Guevara by Bolivian forces backed by the CIA. After killing him, the Bolivians placed Che’s corpse on a hospital laundry sink as photographers took pictures that were later published internationally. Giving Osama Bin-Laden a similar farewell, a short and low-cost endeavour, would have been applauded by the American people.
The more mainstream types in Washington a so called “over the horizon” counterterrorism under which the U.S. and its allies would be able to monitor potential terrorist activity in Afghanistan from a distance, using a mixture of satellite and human intelligence. And, where possible and necessary, intervene with targeted military strikes. They warned that a long-term presence of U.S. troops there
But instead what started as a military operation with clear and limited objectives to obliterate al Qaeda and change the regime in Afghanistan turned out of be the longest war in American history under which the Bush Administration launched an ambitious project of nation building that were supposed to remake the political culture of the country and establish a liberal democratic system there.
Applying “counterinsurgency strategy” or COIN, the idea was that the U.S. would only be able to protect its interests in Afghanistan by providing security i.e. US ground troops, for the civilian population, economic reconstruction and the brokering of political accords — in other words, nation-building.
It assumes that the U.S. has the power and the will - not to mention the interest - to engage in a long and costly process of building a nation-state in Afghanistan — rebuilding, remaking, restructuring, reconstructing, and reforming this failed state and its mishmash of ethnic, religious, and tribal groups - the Pashtun and Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara, and the Aimak and the Turkmen and the Baloch people, its underdeveloped economy, non-existent military, and “civil society” — was nothing more than a fantasy.
Moreover, the U.S. decided to expand what became to be known as the “war on terror” into Iraq and other parts of the Broader Middle East and to promote regime change and nation building there instead of investing its military and intelligence resources on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants and crushing the Taliban forces.
This American strategic miscalculation helped create the conditions for the resurgence of Taliban and played into the hands of its allies in Pakistan. That led to a long and costly series of military battles between the U.S. and the multinational coalition backing it and the Islamist group while providing an opportunity for other terrorist groups to exert their influence in South Asia.
Much of the international focus has been on the rising human costs of the never-ending war on Afghanistan and the financial resources that have been wasted in backing up a series of incompetent and corrupt governments in Kabul.
But America’s decision to allocate its military and financial resources to fighting the war of terror in Afghanistan and other parts of the Broader Middle East diverted its geo-strategic and geo-economic attention from East Asia and rising China which exploited the U.S. preoccupation with West Asia to build-up its power, while another anti-American player, Iran, expanded its power in the Persian Gulf and the Levant.
Both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump entered office pledging to end the U.S. endless wars in the Middle East and to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan where the ambitious plans to establish democracy have failed while the Taliban continued to expand its influence.
But pressure from the U.S. military and concerns that America would lose its “credibility” if that happened, have put on hold the plans to leave that country.
Let’s be realistic: U.S. military withdrawal would probably ignite a similar kind of civil war in Afghanistan as the largest ethnic group, the Pashtun fight with the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara as outside regional powers led by Pakistan, India, Russia and China providing support for their clients.
But contrary to the dire warnings of members of Washington’s War Party such a process could actually help create some level of stability in Afghanistan as Pakistan and India help establish spheres of influence there: Pakistan will maintain its influence in the so-called Pashtun-belt in the south where the Taliban would emerge as the major local player, while India exert its own influence in the north of Afghanistan.
In fact, the expectation for U.S. military pull-out from Iraq has helped produce similar incentives for regional powers like Turkey, Iran and the Sunni Arab states to establish a certain balance of power in that country, with Turkey establishing friendly ties with the Kurds in the North while cooperating with Iran to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state.
Similarly, Iran and the Saudis have a common interest in averting a full-blown military confrontation between the Shiites and the Sunnis. There is no reason why India and Pakistan would not cooperate in controlling their clients in Afghanistan in order to avoid a regional military conflagration.
In any case, outside global powers, including the U.S. are constrained in their ability to shape the political realities in Afghanistan, and they have no moral obligation to do that.
Instead the withdrawal would allow the U.S. to invest its resources in nation building at home and to refocus its attention on the economic and military challenges it now faces in East Asia.