Vietnam, Vietnam, green ladder of the ruthless.
Les Murray
So it ends as it always does. With a scramble. For the last train, the helicopter on the roof, for the other side of the mountain, on cart-rutted tracks. And now for the airbridge. How strange to see the airbridge, that boxy no-space of modernity, repository of mild irritation and tedium, of the commuter hop and the long haul, become a symbol of stark terror.
That’s what history is, I guess, when the elements of the everyday get caught up in the whirlwind, and all is made strange. By the time it happened, one’s dominant feeling was that this day would never come. The US’s Afghan war passed its Vietnam involvement some time ago, and that decade and a half encompassed so many separate passages, so much global struggle and uproar, as to seem to occupy an epoch.
But that was when history was happening, and the helicopters on the roof, and the tanks of the North Vietnamese army crashing through the gates of the presidency in Saigon, seemed to be part of a global struggle between two vast forces, about what modernity would be, a part of the era’s furious pace. Now, in a world where the technology has become history’s pacesetter, something like a foreign war seemed archaic, part of an eternal present.
The Afghan war disappeared from our screens and our minds for years at a time. The violence and terror we are seeing now had never ceased. The war did what wars of occupation do: make many millions of civilians choose sides, between two undesired alternatives, and then suffer the consequences, with the most lethal possible choice being any attempt to stay apart from the fray.
Hundreds of districts changed hands multiple times as the Taliban rode in, as the US rode out, and vice versa. The place has not become more chaotic. The chaos has become more focused and more visible. It is 10 years, 10 years, since the war was dragged back into the spotlight by Wikileaks “cablegate” releases, and the question posed as to what the hell the war was for. At that point, the war had been going for 10 years.
Or 40 years, if you trace the Taliban’s lineage back to the mujahedin, funded, and to some degree assembled, by the US to fight the Soviets in the 1980s. Or 70 years, if you date it back to the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup in Iran, which installed the shah, and thus stirred to political action the Shiite Islamist critics the shah oppressed.
Yet there’s a curious hollowness to the Taliban victory in global geopolitical terms. Islamic fundamentalism has always been a counterfeit movement, ostensibly anti-modern in its message, yet modern par excellence in its focused totality of mission and its willingness to use all the hi-tech capacities and global structures of modernity to advance its cause.
Al-Qaeda drew on the desert mythology of Wahhabism, the Jacobin/Bolshevik focus of purpose, and the organisational and publicity structures of McDonald’s or Sony. The movement spread, but it also decayed within. Islamic State, also called ISIS, arising from the ruins of Allied post-invasion clientelism in Iraq, was the punk version of al-Qaeda.
Having established a caliphate which abolished the colonial Sykes-Picot borders which had carved out Iraq and Syria, it could have served as a sort of violent Islamist international. But it couldn’t stabilise, and victories elsewhere, such as North Africa, were sporadic.
Though the Taliban victory looks spectacular, it is a product of the US’s decision to withdraw at any cost, no matter how bad the optics, just as al-Qaeda was a product of the Saudi leadership’s reliance on US troops to defend it against Iraq.
Will the Taliban’s victory embolden and revive the movement? Unlikely. Violent Islamism is a global religious-political movement with a post-national message. If they couldn’t advance significantly up to now, the Taliban’s victory — of a hybrid religious-national politics — isn’t going to do much for them.
Unless, that is, the Taliban becomes a base and bank for such. This, too, seems unlikely. But who knows? The victory may serve as a spark for a generation of radicals, out of the control of either global groups or the Taliban.
With the “forever war” concluded in such a squalid fashion, the neocon era of US politics and power comes to an end. Not the US projection of power beyond its borders, which continues with shifted priorities. But the whole vast historical projection that went with it has gone.
Late US neoconservatism was the most extreme form of “exceptionalist suprematism”, the notion that the US was not merely the “last, best” hope of man, but the only possible way to be human in modernity. Now a lot of them have retreated to the “folly” argument — two decades wasted, nothing to show, but a noble cause nevertheless.
Even this is a ploy, ignoring the realpolitik advantages of keeping a meatgrinder war going: to stay in the region, and block China from flooding in (even as Pakistan, an ostensible US ally, was funding the Taliban), and with the vague hope that an Afghan government would get down to digging up the trillion or so dollars of mineral wealth identified by a 2010 US geological survey.
Was the chaos of the end avoidable? Maybe, but most likely not. The Biden administration said it did not expect there to be a chaotic finish, and there would be no scenes like the last days of Saigon. In the end it looked like a Netflix remake of the last days of Saigon.
Was this stupidity and naivete on their part? Possibly. But it may also have been an awareness that the chaos would begin as soon as it was countenanced. The pundits of the right are focusing on “folly” so they can portray Biden as dodderingly incompetent — even though he is enacting an agreement that deal-making genius Donald Trump negotiated in 2020, and which basically handed the joint over to the Taliban anyway.
Will Biden suffer in the polls? Less than Jimmy Carter or even Barack Obama. He has a free hand to act because the Republicans have surrendered Reaganite power projection and US dominance for a foreign policy that’s a mix of clientelism, isolationism and sheer indecision. It’s a huge giveaway, and one that Biden has exploited.
The Republicans retreated to the airport a while ago, hanging on to the wheels of Trump’s last Air Force One flight, trying to get safe passage to Mar-a-Lago.
So it ends, as it always does, with a scramble, with the border camps and reprisals, the betrayals and the firing squads. The moral focus at home swings back to helping those who made their choice for our forces in a time of no good choices, and who are now the butt of shitty jokes by Matt Canavan.
Beyond that we try to begin to work out where we are now, on the cart-rutted track of history, our way forward lit by the cities burning behind us.
Where does this leave, Australia? It leaves the country with a Defence Force tainted by the stench of war crimes. With a legacy that threatens to undermine the work of thousands because of the actions of a few. The few need to be identified, put before the courts and left to face the consequences of their actions. The thousands need to look deeply into themselves and the organisation they serve in and ask how did we ( yes, all of you) allow this to happen, and how are we (yes, all of you) going to prevent a repeat? It should also leaves the country demanding clear evidence that what led to the crimes – equivalent to those of from earlier wars – has been excoriated from the force. To not do so will be to leave the Afghanistan campaign as both a strategic and moral failure for the country.
Merely participating in any US led war is both a strategic and moral failure for the country.
It’s almost as if you still believe that there is such thing as a clean war where everyone follows the rules and behaves in a gentlemanly fashion. Think rendition, waterboarding, bombing of wedding parties, hospitals etc . War is always vile, murderous, hideous. Weapons and personnel are designed and trained to maim and kill with increasing ingenuity and ferocity. War is always a failure of honest negotiation. The fanatical, religious aspect adds another dimension. There really is no way of killing and maiming other human beings that is decent and civilised. You can’t really put brackets around certain ‘acceptable’ behaviours that make much sense. War may ever be a component of human experience but it is never nice and never perfectly ok.
When you lose your moral compass you become part of the problem, and no longer part of any solution. You also let down your comrades who do maintain theirs and who behave professionally even though all around them there is the same chaos and destruction. But, if my view is not to your liking, perhaps the tax payers who fund every bullet fired, who pay for every hour of service, should be asked what they expect of their uniformed servants.
Wasn’t it the case that the Taliban wanted to negotiate but Rumsfeld and Cheney were determined to go in boots n all, no matter what?
Yes, they offered to surrender bin Laden to the ICJ at The Hague but it was rejected because the Hegemon does not recognise that court.
Nor the Law of the Sea (hi China!) nor any number of other treaties & conventions common to the civilised nations of the world.
We, as the only animal on this planet, that knows about death and killing their own kind
70 years Guy? Surely the problems between the Great Powers and Afghanistan go back at least to the 1830s and the first Afghan War. The current flight from Kabul may be messy, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the time the British left in1842.
The people in Afghanistan may not be as well educated as the Americans et al who have occupied their country for 20 years, but I’m pretty sure every Pashtun family knows that history, and their ultimate victory.
And we might take it back to Alexander of Macedon too, if we wanted. Rundles was not entirely clearin this article, but it looks as though his timeline is concerned only with US involvement in Afghanistan, which is why he stops at 70 years.
Alexander actually made a reasonable job of occupying the region. He did have to kill at least 50% of the population and then hand the area to one of the local tribal groups to govern it for him. But then that far back they were really not the same people, and even the climate of the region was better.
The Mongols were also pretty good at a form of conquest. That essentially involved killing the population until they stopped resisting. The population of Persia was drastically reduced when they finished with it.
You might spot a pattern here and why modern attempts at pacification have nothing on those empires. And yet those empires did not last either. If you travel around the Middle East and South Asia you find a lot of the remains of Guy’s ‘burning cities’ left behind by previous conflicts over the last few thousand years.
Shelley did the hubris of empire better – brief & to the point
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
What a sad and predictable turn of events. At times such as these your writing soars Guy – ISIS as a punk version of al-Qaeda – wonderful.
It would be nice to think that’s the end of it. But the children of the dead grow up.
A Netflix remake of the fall of Saigon indeed! And its been clear from the early days that nothing was learnt from the Vietnam war. And the beginnings were also similar, even down to the lies from the military and politicians that gave the USA the pretext to go to war in Vietnam and to invade Iraq, and the pretence that nation-building was a goal. Wikileaks has played a major role in exposing some aspects of this and the USA and UK continue to persecute and imprison Julian Assange and other whistleblowers. But governments in the USA, Australia, UK and some other democratic countries are quite happy to remove democratic checks and balances, any accountability, and indeed any expectation that governments can address and even solve problems. Unless they are the problems caused by inconvenient truths exposed by the whistleblowers.