Except that I'm generally a supporter of monarchy, I don't have any views on internal Afghan politics. However, I have views on the West.
One idea I have seen mooted is that the US defeat is a peculiarly striking indictment of the American claim to competence and expertise. We must learn from our defeat. The absolute experts in nation-building, with unlimited resources at their disposal, achieved precisely nothing. This is surely the most extraordinary embarassment. A loss of face. A loss of credibility. A lively encouragement to the rising and unfriendly powers, and a sober warning to our friends and allies. Whither US leadership?
I'm not convinced there's anything to worry about here. The best comparison is the Soviet Union. Here's how one person puts it:
"The Soviet Union was dying in 1989, when it completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. It still managed to do so in an orderly fashion, with a symbolic column of russian APCs crossing the bridge over to Uzbekistan. The leader of the war effort, one Colonel-General Gromov, symbolically rode in the very last BTR, and then proclaimed to the gathered journalists that there wasn’t a single russian soldier behind his back."
(I recommend reading the link. In fact, I recommend all the links in this piece.)
It is a very dark day in Afghanistan Take care of yourself. It might require avoiding the news Even that can be excruciating, I know. We can & should bear witness. But it does not require self harm. Triggering PTSD symptoms or new trauma does not help Afghans My DMs are open
Look, I get it. When the Soviet Union was in Afghanistan, the country was reasonably safe - safe enough for journalists to travel around, for example - and when they left, which did they did in style, their client state lingered on for a bit before it fell. But the US were never in control and ran away with their tails between their legs. It's not a good look.
But what does all that tell us? The Soviet Union was one of the two most powerful nations in the world at the time. It had a land border with Afghanistan and citizens with similar culture. It was an undemocratic and ruthless authoritarian regime. The US is roughly as powerful, but much further away (both geographically and culturally) and less ruthless. Given those constraints, the US did OK. Ruling Afghanistan is not a test of competence: it's a mega-test of extreme outlier competence, and we always knew that the US was not in that league.
Fundamentally, the fact is that the US never intended to govern Afghanistan. Afghanistan was never going to be a US colony or possession. The factoids about how few people learned Dari tell a tale. The US might have poured money in nation building and gender studies at Kabul University and all the rest of it, but it never intended to run Afghanistan. So it never did what successful conquerers have had to do to.
That was good news and it was bad news.
I'll start with the bad news.
"The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service." (That's from here. More on that sort of thing here or, if you can't get through the paywall, here.)
It's a far cry from General Napier on sati: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours". But it's another way of making my point. The British in India were prepared to follow their customs to the point of killing people. That's conquest. The US were not.
Fundamentally, the fact is that the US never intended to govern Afghanistan. Afghanistan was never going to be a US colony or possession. The factoids about how few people learned Dari tell a tale. The US might have poured money in nation building and gender studies at Kabul University and all the rest of it, but it never intended to run Afghanistan. So it never did what successful conquerers have had to do to.
That was good news and it was bad news.
I'll start with the bad news.
"The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service." (That's from here. More on that sort of thing here or, if you can't get through the paywall, here.)
It's a far cry from General Napier on sati: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours". But it's another way of making my point. The British in India were prepared to follow their customs to the point of killing people. That's conquest. The US were not.
As I say, that was the bad news here. Leaving aside boys chained to beds, there seems to be an idea that the main purpose of the US presence in Afghanistan was to promote female education. I don't know about that, but it certainly seems to have been a purpose - and now things are looking bleak on that front too. Empires are not all bad.
But there is good news to America's lack of imperial ambitions, at least if you are running a US ally. There are several countries which have US troops stationed in them. What Afghanistan tells those countries - and has told them for some time - is that the US has no intention of staying in those countries against the settled will of the most vociferous locals. If the people who are often described as 'illiterate goatherds' can kick out the US military, then so can you. That's an encouraging message. If you're a US ally, you're where you were last year or 10 years ago: you've got a powerful friend - powerful, possessed of money and drones galore, but not omnicompetent - who does not want to occupy you: that's the best kind of massively more powerful ally.
So the US' allies have no reason to see Afghanistan as bad news. No, if Afghanistan is to mean anything for the world, it will be because it has had an effect on domestic US politics. And I'm doubtful that it will. "Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan, according to Andrew Tyndall, editor of the authoritative Tyndall Report, which has monitored and coded the networks’ nightly news each weekday since 1988." (Source.) It's really not a big deal. And the fact that it's not a big deal is itself a big deal: it's a sign, to the rest of the world, of quite how rich America is. This hugely wasteful war (vehicles kept running at all times, hamburgers flown in, Viagra for rapists and bribes for everyone) would have been a big deal for any other country in the world. And for the US, it was a smaller deal than Black Lives Matter.
This guy puts my point for me: "... in the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?
If however the situation involving foreign realities can be grafted onto simplistic domestic narratives, in however fantastic a fashion, then that issue becomes a curious side show to the main American stage. That’s what’s happened to Israel, which now features as a talking point in that same progressive wing of the party. And if the situation can’t be mapped, such as Afghanistan or the recent protests in Cuba, it’s utterly ignored for being just completely beyond human comprehension or concern.
This is the true privilege of being an American in 2021 (vs. 1981): Enjoying an imperium so broad and blinding, you’re never made to suffer the limits of your understanding or re-assess your assumptions about a world that, even now, contains regions and peoples and governments antithetical to everything you stand for. If you fight demons, they’re entirely demons of your own creation, whether Cambridge Analytica or QAnon or the ‘insurrection’ or supposed electoral fraud or any of a host of bogeymen, and you get to tweet #resist while not dangling from the side of an airplane or risking your life on a raft to escape. If you’re overwhelmed by what you see, even if you work at places called ‘the Institute for the Study of War’, you can just take some ‘me time’ and not tune into the disturbing images because reality is purely optional at this stage of the game.
" (My emphasis.)
Yup, reality is optional in the US. That's how powerful it still is.
Maybe, eventually, reality will catch up with the US. One point I try to make in this blog is that the West, rather its educated, managerial, technocratic classes - love 'em or loathe 'em! - that we hear about so often, has not really come to grips with what happened in 2008-9: the financial crisis was the proof that a certain kind of globalised, finance-driven development was not the win-win for all sections of society that it had been promised to be; and the aftermath of the financial crisis, the fact that no one was punished for such a huge disaster, there was no regime change, no course correction, no reckoning proved that the governing classes did not care. At some point - surely! - that will matter.
Maybe. But not any time soon, and not, I think, because of Afghanistan.
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