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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on the G7’s great game: the Taliban rules in Kabul | Editorial

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      OpinionAfghanistanThe Guardian view on the G7’s great game: the Taliban rules in KabulEditorialOrdinary Afghans will pay the highest price for the west’s defeated ambitions Tue 24 Aug 2021 14.01 EDTLast modified on Tue 24 Aug 2021 14.58 EDTIt speaks volumes about the world today that a US president was more worried about the Taliban looking weak than about his western allies. Britain, France and Germany asked Joe Biden to continue evacuating civilians from Kabul past his self-imposed deadline of 31 August. But the US rejected these requests. Mr Biden wanted to end the chaotic TV scenes from Afghanistan that hurt his domestic poll ratings. But he also accepted that Kabul’s new rulers could not afford to look weak in front of their rival Isis, which is looking for an opportunity to embarrass its Taliban peer.The west’s airlift will therefore be over by next Tuesday. It is the Afghan people who will pay the highest price for the west’s defeated ambitions for their country. They now face living under Taliban rule for a second time. There is no guarantee that a grinding civil war is over. The scale of the west’s failure is not just that the world’s biggest economies will almost certainly fail to evacuate all those who were employed by its armies and diplomats. It is that we have let down a generation of urban Afghans, especially women, who grew up believing that their lives would be better than their parents’.Afghanistan faces a series of crises that would tax the most able technocrats. Yet at the country’s helm is the world’s most obscurantist leadership. Covid has a long way to run in Afghanistan, but only 2% of the population has been vaccinated. The Taliban struggle with the idea of female doctors working in hospitals, let alone how to tackle coronavirus. A drought has caused famine in rural parts of the country, but Afghanistan’s new rulers see humanitarian work as the preserve of charities rather than the state.The Taliban have no experience of legislating within a sophisticated political and legal framework, especially one of the kind modelled on western democracies. When they last ran the country, a cash economy did not exist. In the Afghan central bank, more than two decades ago, the Taliban installed military commanders. One died on the battlefield while still the bank’s governor.The west’s economic model for Afghanistan was, at best, a work in progress. The country has become dependent on international assistance, while poverty rates have increased from a third of the population to more than a half. Unless something extraordinary happens, foreign aid will dry up, leaving the Taliban not only unable to pay for government salaries but also without the resources to cover Afghanistan’s import bill. With the US refusing to hand over Kabul’s dollar reserves, the Afghan currency is likely to collapse in value, sparking a price spiral. Inflation and scarcity are not exactly solid foundations on which to base the stability of a regime.One cannot import development, only encourage it from within. Two Asian countries that have risen by throwing off outside rule – Vietnam and Bangladesh – show that it is possible to wean a country off foreign aid in a substantial way by creating an industrial base. The new Kabul regime is more likely to fall back on opium production, confirming its global pariah status while further diminishing the nation’s productive capacity.Afghanistan’s complexity – its patchwork of ethnicities, traditions and minimal governance – makes it hard to understand. The G7 might be able to use a carrot-and-stick approach with the Taliban. It could offer cash in return for the group respecting human rights or threaten sanctions if Kabul breaks promises. The world, ultimately, will have to adjust to American interest in Afghanistan assuming more conventional proportions. Washington, in the future, will monitor jihadist threats from afar and seek to preserve political balance in Kabul. What has disappeared is the latest attempt to impose a new Afghan society on top of an old one.TopicsAfghanistanOpinionTalibanJoe BidenSouth and Central AsiaCoronavirusUS politicsForeign policyeditorialsReuse this content More

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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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