The United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan doesn’t mark the end of US power in the world, but it does mark the end of the neoconservative era. I don’t see how that can seriously be doubted.
The neocon ideal was that the US was a virtuous power — possibly one divinely ordained — which had a moral duty to gain itself another century of global dominance and spread liberal democracy to be taken up instantly by the people it invaded.
That is utterly gone, a memory of a delusional period after the end of the cold war and before China was ready to assert itself on the world stage. It failed everywhere it was tried. But rather than admit the flawed nature of the idea, the last stragglers at History Airport are looking for something, anything, to blame.
What have they come up with? America was defeated in Afghanistan because the country and its army had become “too woke”.
The West has lost its spirit to impose order, and its armies have lost their capacity to fight because the latter are giving troops lectures on appropriate use of pronouns, and the West as a whole is so bowed down with guilt over past colonial imperialism that it cannot act in a resolute fashion. It’s a consoling myth that covers the far more complex forces of our recent history, and obscures the paradoxes at the heart of this vast failed mission.
The plain truth is that Western colonial empires relied for their energy and resolve on essential notions of race, tied to both dominance and progress. “Virtuous race” was already in trouble by World War I. After World War II, reckoning with the Holocaust saw it rejected entirely. The cold war gave reason to back coups and wars, but under the cover of such, mass decolonisation occurred. In shifting to a post-cold war era, we lost the one rationale strong enough to power a war of brutality, conquest and dominance.
To dominate Afghanistan we would have had to do things such as would make a mockery of the war’s humanitarian claims. It would have taken half a million troops on the ground, which would be unacceptable back home. It would have required “pacification” — mass population removal to control zones — to deny the Taliban a context in which to operate. Or it would have required mass area bombing with extremely high civilian casualties.
In all cases, destroying the country in order to save it.
Could the US have got away with this in 2001-02, when 9/11 had its blood up? That would have been the only time, and it still wouldn’t have worked unless it was of such terror — a half million or so dead — as to obliterate anything the Taliban were. But it would have had to stop some time. And what next? Children grow, and 15-year-olds take up arms, and it restarts with redoubled ferocity.
For years occupation toddled along as a blocking operation. But something more was needed, and thus the education of women and girls came to the fore. This had never been part of the initial plan. It came to be branded as nation-building, but it was its opposite. In nation-building, you wipe out antagonistic ideals and forces, establish institutions commensurate with a conquered people’s deeper culture, establish relations and leave them to it.
The whole “women-and-girls” thing was a farce. It was the rationale by which the Rudd/Gillard governments stayed in the war, at the same time that Tony Abbott took it up.
That should have been a clue. It was a war aim reverse-engineered out of the war itself, to give it meaning. It followed the same playbook as the Soviets who, following their 1979 invasion, had tried to make Afghanistan a showcase for fast-track Marxist developmentalism, bringing a village peasant society to modernity in a generation.
That effort, and our own, is social reconstruction, not nation-building. Its effect is to take one key dimension of social life — gender relations — and distort it so utterly as to throw all social relations into disarray. It is the logic of colonisation of Indigenous peoples and it supercharges resistance.
What is life worth if people are going to not merely rule you, but change who you are? Death in combat acquires deep meaning from that, because in resisting you are saving part of yourself that might otherwise be annihilated. That was the energy of the mujahedin, which the US took to the next level, with money, weapons and advisers. From there, al-Qaeda and the Taliban were seeded.
Haunting, isn’t it, to see now the CNN footage from 25 years ago as the Taliban came into Kabul, hanging chunky TV sets from lampposts? And today, as they give AK-47-on-the-oak-desk press conferences in their Ray-Bans and bandanas, checking their recruitment app on their androids?
The full disaster is this: by the late 1990s, the Taliban had already modulated, as any revolutionary regime must, to actual governance. They were working cautiously with NGOs — including women’s groups — on healthcare, rural water supply and other such matters. Twenty years of war has re-radicalised, and given them plenty of lethal fervour against collaborators.
We haven’t gone nowhere in this war — we have gone backwards, the Afghans and the world.
So Afghanistan has proved the graveyard of another empire. It was an imaginary one, but the bodies on the ground are real. The neocons? Their concern is moving from the order of battle to the line-up of the Wiggles as they try to find a way into History Airport with their baggage, trying to get the last flight out.
‘The whole “women-and-girls” thing was a farce.’
‘It was a war aim reverse-engineered out of the war itself, to give it meaning’.
Reminds me of saving asylum seekers from drowning at sea, an afterthought to justify immoral policies and behaviour.
Perfect analogous example, encapsulating the faux sincerity, the utterly egregious post ergo propter hoc fallacy and the total hypocrisy of such mewlings.
How does that compare? Someone drowning is an immediate emergency and a moral duty. Taking one aspect of a patriarchal society and trying to re-engineer it alone, is a strategic choice. It’s because it was done as a bit of branding, that the way it was done contributed to the disaster.
It compares in that it is a false sentiment, one used to support an argument way more fundamental. They didn’t really care about ‘deaths at sea’, it was just a convenient cover for the real thing, a punitive approach to asylum seekers. Just like they don’t really care about ‘women and girls’, it is a cover to wage a never-ending war.
You must have deliberately misconstrued OldFella‘s point – it is impossible to think that the earlier you would write such quotidian boilerplate.
Next you’ll be telling us that neolib economics is a valid concept.
You’re just full-time in the comment sections criticising opinions with which you disagree – which would be totally fine if you actually made any substantive points. Alas your criticism is content free. This is just as closed minded as the Murdoch-ians you sneer at
All fair enough. This war was lost even before it started. But when Rundle claims the neo-con era is over he might pay more attention to what comes next. It is already here and growing rapidly. The delusional claims that the USA and its allies lost only because of wokeness and so on are significant. This is a new variant of the old “stab in the back” excuses used to deflect blame, ignore reality, stoke resentment and build fascist sentiments. These elements grow stronger as our democratic institutions (such as they are) wither and crumble. Yes, “we have gone backwards”. But the neo-cons are not going away. They are metastasising.
An interesting and scary insight SSR. We all consume our history prior to WWII, and I’m reminded of the book “Everything is obvious, once you know the answer.” The thrust of the book is how we look back on events as seemingly inevitable, and that anyone could have seen it coming, and that this obviously led to that which obviously led to That Man, but it is a trick of the brain, heuristics in action. What was it like to live in 1930s Europe, or Germany more specifically? Just how obvious was it that it would inevitably lead to WWII and mass murder of the Jews? We can’t actually know from history books. Some certainly foresaw it and got out, but so many didn’t, and others saw it but thought it benign.
Are we now at some great inflection point leading to ruin? I certainly agree that the neo-cons are not going away, that they are metastasising. We are certainly at a danger point, where science, rationality and anti-racism are meeting critical resistance. Recent genuine news in SMH/Nine journals regarding operatives of the extreme right come to mind. Is this how it starts?
I recently recommended in comments, Fromm’s Fear of Freedom for insights into the rise of Fascism. Let me strongly recommend the diaries of Victor Klemperer (cousin of conductor Otto) if you want an almost day by day record of the experience of the Nazis from 1933 by a German Jew living in Dresden. This gives one person’s series of snapshots of what and was not perceivable as the Nazis consolidated power and embarked, in fits and starts, on the paroxysms of hatred, destruction and bureaucratised murder that culminated in WW2, the Final Solution and scorched earth across Europe. The third volume his diaries deals with life under the East German regime, another dictatorship also bent on social reconstruction. Pretty aptly the third volume bears the title, The Lesser Evil.
Sie wollen “total freedom”? Sie haben “total freedom”!
Yes, they are. But the power they had to create a whole mythology and shape events with it. Thats gone, as is their hold in the republican party….
So long as there is money to be made, the neo-cons will be players.
Has anyone ever thought of a different approach than war/weapons?
In the early 70th, for a couple of months, my husband and I travelled by public transport all around Afghanistan. It was an extremely poor but beautiful and interesting country. We felt safe, people were friendly and helpful. I was treated wit respect. In the bigger cities, especially in Kabul, women in miniskirt and long boots were waiting on the bus stop next to women wearing the burka. Mercedes buses were used as the main transport, but has well one could see on the main road’s, men pulling wooden carts. It was like two worlds were coming together, or on a crossroad, however one likes to look at it. We loved our time in Afghanistan and always had hoped to return. But then the Russian invasion changed it all and the so called “warlords” combined against a common enemy, the Taliban were born. Most Afghanis hate the Taliban. According to recent statistics they have only about 15% support.
The US invaded to destroy the terrorist training grounds. Instead staying on fighting with weapons, they could have used the money to provide aid. Locals joined the Taliban, as they had no choice. The Taliban paid well, they looked after the poor villages. But of course, that would have cost money, while weapons make money. Mind you, counting the cost of human lives, it might have been a better option and a sustainable option. But then again, weapon might be better investments. In the last few years, the West hardly reported any death and I guess it had become more a humanitarian aid exercise and the profitable weapon trade no longer existed. I am not an expert, but it did not have to come to this, surely at least a very slow retreat would have been better. Anything to what we are seeing now, would have been better. Australia never has a plan how and why to enter a war, leave alone a plan how to exit. If the US just as much of thinking entering a war, Australia begs to be included.
Thanks for that Goto. Raises a really interesting point: traditional cultures only become persecutory when theyre weaponised – often in response to threat. That is part of the tragedy of whats happened
I was pleased to see your opening about Afghanistan in the early 70s which was an accurate description of the modernising country whch had been planned for many decades.
However, you then mix at least three, widely separated, timelines – “…the Russian invasion changed it all and the so called “warlords” combined against a common enemy, the Taliban were born.”.
Not true.
The mullah militias, funded by the CIA and then Carter, began destroying all the 60/70s modernisations until the government begged the Soviets for help.
The continued funding and material support from Reagan & Bush Snr then created the mujahedin (hi, bin Liner!) which were so corrupt that by 1989, when the Russians left, in good order marching over the Amu bridges, there were 4M Afghan refugees in CIA funded camps throughout the Pathan regions of northern Pakistan.
The madrassas in those camps created the Taliban in the 90s to fight the mujahedin which they did, successfully.
May I recommend and urge you to read former Head of the British Chancery in Kabul, Sir Martin Ewans’ book, Afghanistan, a Short History” (2002) or the new edition “Afghanistan – A New History” (2015)?
I must admit that I was not quite sure if my timeline about the Taliban was correct. Thanks Selkie, for clarifying that point, though it does not change the
essence of what I said. I just searched for the book, as I would have been interested
reading it. Unfortunately, both of those books are around A$ 90. Goodreads only
has one review and that gave “Afghanistan – A New History”. Only one star out
of 5. The review had no comments; hence I don’t know why the review was so
poor. I would have like to read the book and made up my own mind, but not for $90.
Both are available via the Sydney Interlibrary loan system.
You wrote that the problem “..the Russian invasion changed it all..” which is incorrect and is a typical calumny caused by an incurious media and its stenographers constantly repeating the Big Lie.
Just like Gulf of Tonkin, Kuwaiti babies tipped out of incubators (a 1990 update of the Hun catching babies on bayonets in WWI) and WMD etc etc ad nauseam.
Robert Garnett below makes the same points that I have been putting here.
Wars are like extramarital affairs – easy to get into, hard to get out of.
And taint all involved to their great cost.
The Americans seemed to believe that if only others were given the chance, they would want to be pretty much like us. They’re not alone in believing this, but they had a lot of power to try to make it work. It didn’t.
They have spent a century watching movies which reinforce their founding myths such as Manifest Destiny and the One Indispensable Nation so no surprise that Cotton, a crazy’s crazy should channel Prez Bartlett from WestWing –
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) “The fiasco in Afghanistan wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. Joe Biden’s ill-planned retreat has now humiliated America and put at risk thousands of Americans left in Kabul. At a minimum, President Biden must unleash American air power to destroy every Taliban fighter in the vicinity of Kabul until we can save our fellow Americans. Anything less will further confirm Joe Biden’s impotence to the world.”
The debacle of the last twenty years of occupation of Afghanistan by the US didn’t start with the neocons it was started by President Carter 1978/79 when he approved the following:
1) Providing open-ended aid to the Mujahedin without regard for the aims and characteristics of the insurgents themselves;
2) Empowering Pakistan to channel that aid exclusively among the seven most extreme Islamist Mujahedin groups;
3) Concerting with Islamic countries, principally Saudi Arabia, which matched CIA funding dollar-for-dollar and independently ran a parallel program to support Islamic jihad in Afghanistan;
4) Granting substantial economic, security, and political support to Pakistan, including waivers of non-proliferation sanctions and suspension of investigations into trafficking nuclear weapons components and technology.
He was responding to the rabid Soviet hater his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinsk.
Asked, by Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998, “given the catastrophe unleashed upon Afghanistan and the subsequent growth of Islamist terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, whether he regretted the policy he championed in Afghanistan”, Brzezinski replied:
“Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”
In fact Brzezinski according to Conor Tobin did not deliberately set out to “Trap the USSR in Afghanistan, but a trap it did become.
(The Myth of the “Afghan Trap”: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan, 1978–1979
Conor Tobin Diplomatic History, Volume 44, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 237–264, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhz065)
Carters containment of the USSR and the Afghanistan Policy was known as the Carter Doctrine. When Regan came in he adopted it as the Reagan Doctrine.
Afghanistan is certainly a dispensable nation, which has been dispensed in the most criminally appalling way.
I had a bet with my wife that the US would last longer than the USSR’s nine years of war. Sadly she waouldn’t take the bet.
I smiled when I saw some footage of Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinsk addressing the Taliban and saying *God is on your side*
No it didnt begin with the neocons. But thats what these operations got swept into, as an overarching narrative, extending them beyond the utility that Zbig described…
You make the same points I have been for some weeks and only omitted the big Zbig’s offhand remark “…who cares if it leaves behind a bunch of stirred up muzzies?”
Perhaps those who saw the Twin Towers fall?