As Western troops withdraw from Afghanistan, follwing the lead of US President Biden, the country is on the verge of falling back under the control of the Taliban. Biden's decision, a rare instance of him maintaining the policy of his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, appears popular among the American populace. The 2001 War In Afghanistan, which has seen a significant, if dimishing, presence of US and international troops in the country and vast expense poured into what has often appeared a black hole of corruption and directionless nation-building initiatives, has been a source of understandable frustration and embarrassment for the American people in particular at the myriad failures of reactionary post-9/11 policy.
Biden perhaps views the US withdrawal as a win-win. He can present himself as making a decisive, popular move while severing the sunk cost fallacy that the American presence in Afghanistan appears to be. Biden, for better or worse depending on your politics, is determined to build a new America. Departing Afghanistan, in all but a token presence, can be presented as his administration taking the nation forward, freed from its past mistakes. The decision to withdraw the troops by 9/11 is one of those garish pieces of useless symbolism which plays well in the part of the American psyche so constructed around sloganeered storytelling. Unfortunately, in common with so many decisions made since the West invaded Afghanistan two decades ago, a decision based on short-termist illusions of success, seemingly legitimised by domestic popularity, is likely to have destructive consequences not only for the people of Afghanistan, but the stability and moral authority of the West as well.
Republicans, who uttered nary a peep when Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for this move under his administration, are invoking the American withdrawal from Saigon to attack Biden's position. Their hypocrisy aside, a more appropriate comparison - albeit one the Republicans would likely rather keep quiet - is the decision by President George H.W. Bush not to invade Iraq in 1991 after successfully driving Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in the First Gulf War. With Saddam Hussein weakened, Bush encouraged a Shi'ite rebellion to overthrow him, yet subsequently refused to get involved when the uprising was brutally slaughtered by Hussein's Republican Guard.
The anger and betrayal felt by the Iraqi Shi'ites has tainted the United States ever since, in the Middle East and beyond. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan is only likely to foment an equal, if not greater anti-American, and by extension anti-Western, sentiment among the people left behind to suffer the oppression and brutality of Taliban rule.
The most plausible beneficiary is, as usual, China - Russia might talk a big game, but is more of a troublemaker than a serious threat to Western power. As in so many other nations bearing strong anti-American feeling, China has been using its economic power to gain leverage in neighbouring Pakistan through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, part of its Belt And Road Initiative. While a weak Pakistan would not likely benefit from its strong Islamist elements being galvanised by the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan, a China willing to recognise the Taliban as rulers of the country would only deepen their ability to make inroads in the region as a whole. The motivations behind China's Belt And Road Initiative are less about making allies and more about making dependents: an unstable Pakistan, already heavily indebted to China, only strengthens that hand.
Meanwhile, China's international propaganda campaign against Western imperialism, arguably at its most successful in the West itself, where it has been ravenously lapped up by the universities and their dogmatically-blighted students, has been given another enormous shot in the arm. This is not to argue that Western interventionist policies have not been often misguided and disastrous in their outcomes, particularly in the Middle-East. The success or failure of each specific military action is less relevant in the bigger picture than the undermining of the values of democracy and freedom which America represents and seeks to export, however cack-handedly, and the consequent legitimisation of the totalitarian values of Communist China, allowing it to operate free from serious international scrutiny both abroad and domestically, such as in its intended genocide of its Uighur Muslim population.
There are many reasons why China is unlikely to overtake the US anytime soon as the world's dominant economic or military superpower, but there are just as many reasons it may not have to: where America is blinkered by trying to keep those economic and military dishes spinning, China is playing a long-game war of values. An America which is forced to, or willingly, act like China or in the Chinese national interest is no America at all. On its own, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan may not seem like an especially big development, but it adds not only to the immediate risk of strengthening the Islamist threat around the world, but also the long-term cascade risk of the destruction of the West's moral authority as the grip of China's tyrannical Communist values tightens.
While this is a loss for all of us who believe in the value of free, democratic and capitalist societies, however imperfect they are and by design must be, those who will suffer the most will of course be the people of Afghanistan. As incompetent as the West's attempt at nation-building in the country has been, it has allowed the Afghans a glimpse at values such as equality of the sexes, human rights and democracy, forbidden under the Taliban and which might, in some form unique to their own cultural and social needs, have formed a better and more just future. The West may have been wildly misguided in trying to shape Afghanistan in its own image, but after all the mistakes it has made, it owes those people a debt to afford them the safety from which they can shape the nation they want.
Those who argue that after twenty years, the Western presence in Afghanistan was one with no visible endgame, mired in corruption and should never have happened in the first place, are all coming from reasonable positions. However, the fact is that the West did invade, and in doing so established an obligation not only to its own interests, but those of the Afghan people. As much as our presence may feel futile and hopeless, for those soon to be kicked back under Taliban dominance, our departure is an act of cruelty, betrayal and cowardice. However long it takes and whatever the cost, as people and as nations, our obligation is to rectify our mistakes, not run from them and leave others to absorb the cost. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was an underplanned and unnecessary act of wounded pride. The 2021 withdrawal could be just as big a mistake, with even graver consequences.
