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      in World Politics

      What the World Can Learn From the Events in Afghanistan

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      The collapse of the Western-backed government in Afghanistan has come as a shock. It has shaken confidence in democratic countries and changed the balance of power somewhat between the United States and China.

      It shows that efforts from the outside to topple regimes and replace them with friendlier ones are more difficult than anyone thought 20 years ago, when NATO forces first overthrew the Taliban regime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The aim of capturing Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, which was being harbored by the Taliban, was not achieved until much later in 2011. Even his attempted arrest and subsequent death took place in Pakistan — an ostensible ally of the United States — not Afghanistan. 

      The Hazaras of Afghanistan Face a Threat to Survival

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      The end of the US-led intervention in Afghanistan has lessons for those who might wish to undertake similar exercises in Somalia, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Mali or Venezuela. The objectives need to be clear and limited. Local support must be genuine. If one is seeking out terrorist organizations or individuals, an invasion is not the best way of achieving extradition. Nation-building is best done by locals.

      Existing regimes may be oppressive or corrupt, but if they are homegrown and have been developed organically from local roots, they survive better than anything — however enlightened — introduced from outside. Foreign boots on the ground and targeted bombings have limited effectiveness against networks of fanatics or mobile guerrillas. Western countries will now need to reassess their military spending priorities in light of the lessons from military interventions in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.

      With Afghanistan, it is the US and NATO that have the hardest lessons to learn. But if China were to attempt a similar exercise in nation-building from the outside — say, in Taiwan — it would have the same experience. The fact that Beijing has had to adopt such extreme measures in Xinjiang to integrate that province into the Chinese social system is a sign of weakness rather than strength. 

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      Afghanistan is an ethnically diverse country that, despite its diversity and disunity, has been able to resist rule from Britain, the Soviet Union and now the US and NATO. Religion was a unifying factor in an otherwise divided country. It seems the Taliban have been more effective in building an ethnically diverse coalition than the previous Afghan government. But it is not yet clear whether the Taliban will be able to hold that coalition together.

      It does seem that the Taliban have, in the past, been able to impose a degree of order in Afghan society and been able to punish corruption. Between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban created a form of order in a brutal and misogynistic way. Order is something the outgoing government in Kabul could not provide, even with generous outside help. After all, order is a prerequisite for any form of stable existence. Without order, there can be no rule of law and no democracy. Coupled with that, civil society breaks down. This applies in the West as much as it does in Central Asia and South Asia.

      Order is created by a combination of three essentials: loyalty, acquiescence and fear. All three elements are needed to some extent. Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president between 2001 and 2014, could not command these three elements. It remains to be seen whether the Taliban will do any better.

      Will There Be a Change in US Strategy? 

      It is hard to assess the effect the Afghan debacle will have on the United States, which has by far the most elaborate and expensive military forces in the world. There is a strong temptation to turn inward and reduce commitments to the defense of other countries, including European ones. From 1783 until 1941, the US tended to remain neutral and rely on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for protection against its enemies.  

      The countries of the European Union will also need to work out what their practical defense priorities are in light of the events in Afghanistan and other recent experiences. This is a political task of great difficulty because the 27 member states have very different views and geographic imperatives.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden: withdrawal from Afghanistan would always be 'hard and painful' – video

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      The evacuation of thousands of Americans and their Afghan allies from Kabul would have been ‘hard and painful no matter when it started or when we began’, Joe Biden said on Sunday, amid fierce criticism of his administration’s handling of the US withdrawal.
      Answering questions, he said it was possible that his deadline for the completion of the evacuation, 31 August, would be extended

      Biden: Afghanistan evacuations would always have been ‘hard and painful’ More

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      in Elections

      As Biden Faces a Political Crisis, His Party Looks On in Alarm

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      Democrats fear that if the pandemic or the situation in Afghanistan continues to worsen, their party may lose the confidence of the moderate swing voters who lifted it to victory in 2020.With President Biden facing a political crisis that has shaken his standing in his party, Democrats across the country are increasingly worried about their ability to maintain power in Washington, as his administration struggles to defend its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and stanch a resurgent pandemic that appeared to be waning only weeks ago.While Americans watched devastating scenes of mayhem at the Kabul airport and ascendant Taliban forces last week, the steady drumbeat of bipartisan criticism left many Democrats frustrated and dismayed at a White House they viewed as having fumbled the end of the country’s longest war on multiple fronts.On Capitol Hill, lawmakers announced congressional investigations into the administration’s handling of the withdrawal, as a handful of Democratic lawmakers weighed whether calling for the resignation of Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, would help the president “reset the narrative,” according to a Democratic House member, speaking on the condition of anonymity.The harrowing images appalled even the president’s staunchest supporters, many of whom — like a majority of the American public — support the decision to remove American troops from Afghanistan. But some of them worry the execution of the withdrawal has undermined Mr. Biden’s central campaign promise to restore a steady hand to governance, particularly on issues of national security.Interviews with more than 40 Democrats, lawmakers, strategists and party officials show a White House at a pivot point. If the virus continues to worsen or the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates further, many of the president’s allies fear he will lose the confidence of the moderate swing voters who lifted his party to victory in 2020. Already, Democrats in battleground districts have been sounding alarms that the party needs to become more aggressive with their messaging, particularly on the economy and the efforts to combat the surge in coronavirus cases fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant.There are plenty of other reasons for Democrats to be worried: Historically, the president’s party loses seats in the midterm elections and the Republican advantage in redistricting has only increased those odds.For many establishment Democrats, the Taliban’s rapid seizure of Afghanistan was the first time during Mr. Biden’s administration that they found themselves creating any daylight between themselves and the president.“I consider Afghanistan a bone-headed mistake, unforced error,” said David Walters, a former Oklahoma governor who is now a member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee. “There is no real excuse. This was morally and politically a disaster and just bad policy.”Yet, so far, most of the party has walked a fine line between expressing dismay at the current situation while not publicly denouncing the White House’s role in it.“Afghanistan definitely has entered the conversation in a big way. We’ve done six or seven town halls in the last week and Afghanistan has come up in all of them,” said State Senator Jeff Jackson of North Carolina, an Army veteran who fought in Kandahar and is now running for the U.S. Senate. “It’s pretty clear there are concerns. They’ve seen the images we’ve all seen.”Still, when asked about the administration’s responsibility for the evacuation of Afghans who risked their lives to support U.S. troops, Mr. Jackson offered a tempered critique.“It should have been a much higher priority for the current administration,” he said.On a conference call on Friday organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, four House members who served in the military — two Democrats and two Republicans — tried to tamp down the political recriminations, but their frustrations peeked through. Representative Kai Kahele, Democrat of Hawaii, acknowledged that the “optics” could not “get any worse than an entire airfield of Afghans running around a taxiing C-17, having that aircraft take off and have Afghans fall to their deaths.”Representative Kai Kahele, Democrat of Hawaii, is a combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.Kelsey Walling/Hawaii Tribune-Herald, via Associated PressWhether that kind of restraint will hold remains a major question for the White House. Administration officials believe that the public remains on their side, with polling showing firm support for the withdrawal, and that any political fallout from the current crisis will fade long before the midterm elections. But Republicans are salivating over what they see as an opportunity to push a broader narrative of a weak and incompetent White House, furthering the caricature of Mr. Biden as a bystander in his own administration.“​​Democrats are universally satisfied with their president. They think he’s kept his promises and they blame Republican obstruction for anything that he hasn’t gotten,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who recently consulted with the White House on its pandemic response. “That said, there’s a certain point when Democrats will begin to question whether he’s got the right stuff.”Mr. Biden has offered a defiant defense of both his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and his handling of the resurgence of the virus. After a campaign that promised bipartisan comity and a desire to extend a hand across the aisle, Mr. Biden has begun blaming Republican governors, some of whom have banned mask mandates in their states, for prolonging the pandemic and threatening the safe return to in-person schooling.He has attributed the swift collapse of the government in Kabul and tumultuous scenes at the airport there to the refusal of Afghanistan’s military to fight in the face of the Taliban advance. On Friday, Mr. Biden offered his most extensive remarks about the situation in a news conference, a tacit acknowledgment by the administration that its earlier response had failed to assuage concerns.“I made the decision,” he said, while acknowledging that the United States received conflicting information before the operation about how quickly Afghanistan’s government might fall. “I took the consensus opinion.”Mr. Biden’s response was a sharp departure for a politician who spent decades stressing the importance of human rights while cultivating a folksy, feel-your-pain persona.Meighan Stone, an expert on women’s rights and foreign policy with the Council on Foreign Relations, said Democratic women spent years hearing about the plight of Afghan women and many were disappointed in what they saw as Mr. Biden’s callous response in this moment of crisis.“It’s been deeply disappointing to see the lack of empathy communicated,” said Ms. Stone, who also sits on the board of Indivisible, a national network of local liberal groups. “There’s a profound disconnect between President Biden’s remarks and the images women are seeing on TV and social media of Afghan women and girls in need.”Strategists in both parties caution that the midterm elections are still more than a year away, leaving far from certain the long-term political effect of both the Delta variant and Afghanistan on Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate and House.Understand the Taliban Takeover in AfghanistanCard 1 of 5Who are the Taliban? 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      in US Politics

      The west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan | Simon Jenkins

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      OpinionAfghanistanThe west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in AfghanistanSimon JenkinsBritish MPs have turned on Boris Johnson – but what tidy end did they expect from this imperialist experiment? Fri 20 Aug 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 20 Aug 2021 04.32 EDTBritain’s MPs this week uttered one long howl of anguish over Afghanistan. Their immediate targets were Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, politicians who just happened to be on the watch when Kabul’s pack of cards collapsed. But their real concern was that a collective 20-year experiment in “exporting western values” to Afghanistan had fallen into chaos. MPs wanted someone other than themselves to blame. A politician is never so angry as when proved wrong.Even the crisis in Afghanistan can’t break the spell of Britain’s delusional foreign policy | Owen JonesRead moreLike their fellow representatives in Congress, MPs somehow hoped the end would be nice and tidy, with speeches and flags, much like Britain’s exit from Hong Kong. Instead, tens of thousands of Afghans who had lived in an effective colony under years of Nato occupation had come to believe the west would either never leave or somehow protect them from Taliban retribution. They were swiftly disabused.In 2006 I stood at dusk on a castle wall overlooking Kabul with a young UN official. He had just heard the Kandahar road was no longer safe. “Why,” he sighed, “can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden?” I tried to see if he was smiling, but he was grimacing. For another 15 years, armies of western soldiers and civilians hurled stupefying amounts of money at the country. They created a wildly corrupt western dependency, where some 50,000 Afghans have links with the west that are now lethal. As for the “western-trained” army, one of its trainers told me it was mostly for show. An occupying power could not possibly motivate local youths to kill their fellow countrymen who might soon be ruling them. He rightly predicted: “They will just walk home.”It is now 22 years since Tony Blair gave a speech in Chicago lecturing the US on his doctrine of international intervention. He wanted the west to invade countries across the world not in self-defence, but to save people everywhere from oppression. It was a reformulation of Alfred Milner’s Victorian concept of moral imperialism. British politicians on both the left and the right have long been uncomfortable about the abandonment of Milnerism as the acceptable face of empire. Global policing is somehow embedded in Britain’s political DNA. All Blair’s wars of aggression were cheered on in the House of Commons.Many people have spoken this week of the “decline of the west”, lamenting the collapse of US moral authority. Yet these theories are beside the point. The belief that our moral values are somehow meaningless unless they are enforced upon those who do not share them is imperialist bigotry. It also leads to absurd biases. Iraq is now thought of as “bad interventionism”, as opposed to Afghanistan’s “good” version. The virtue of the latter invasion led President Obama in 2009 to bless the war in Afghanistan with a “surge” of soldiers, taking the US total to 110,000, mere target practice for the Taliban.American gunboat diplomacy, initially supposed to salve the wounds of 9/11 in 2001, opened the door to fake morality and a trillion-dollar nation-building fantasy. The catastrophic return of Taliban autonomy became its inevitable conclusion. The US – with Britain as its lackey – committed liberal interventionism’s cardinal sin: half-heartedness. The craving to intervene is always followed by a craving to withdraw. Traditional empires at least pretended they would never leave. As it was, Afghanistan replicated departures from India, South Africa, Hong Kong and Iraq. If you invade and conquer an alien state, you own it, but must then disown it. Western rule has killed an estimated 240,000 in Afghanistan since 2001, more than the Taliban ever did. It has not left morality, just a mess. We must assume strategists in Washington and London are now planning interventions in Taiwan and Ukraine against possible Chinese and Russian expansion. If you ask taxpayers to spend billions on defence, you need something to show for it. So you pretend, as Johnson did in his bizarre conversation with Biden this week, that “gains” were made in Afghanistan. You accuse non-interventionists, as did the former Tory leader William Hague, of demonstrating “the enfeeblement of the western mind”. In a recent column, Hague called on Britain to continue invading foreign countries when “our common humanity demands it”. In doing so, he sounded like Pope Urban summoning the First Crusade.The concept of a global police force, so often cited, requires some framework of global consent. When the United Nations was founded, that consent was rooted in the first chapter of its charter. This stated that all members “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state”. On that basis it achieved general consent, if not always obedience. The end of the cold war and the assumed superiority of liberal western values emboldened the US and Britain to declare a “responsibility to protect” all those oppressed by their governments. The authority of the UN charter – rooted in national sovereignty – collapsed, and the UN gave way to the US as a self-declared policeman.The American cold war historian Francis Fukuyama wrote recently that the US “is not likely to regain its earlier hegemonic status, nor should it aspire to”. There is no such thing as a global policeman. Individual nations best serve humanity by example or charity, not by war. Military intervention is rarely, if ever, humane. Western regimes have enough woes to confront in their own countries. If they crave moral outreach, it should be through the imperialism of ideas, of receptive minds and open doors, not of guns and bombs.
      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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