November 2021

By Simon Korner

Has the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan weakened America’s global pre-eminence?

One right-wing American commentator Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, seems to think so, writing on August 16 he said: "NATO is a dead man walking…Simply put … Biden’s incompetence now risks the entire post-World War II liberal order … God help the United States”. The liberal American media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, all expressed similar fears and called for the withdrawal to be reversed. In Britain, Tony Blair, the architect of interventionism, described the US withdrawal as “imbecilic” (BBC, August 22) and blamed the US for backing the corrupt Afghan government and handing victory to terrorists and to Russia and China. Defence Minister Ben Wallace, as well as Labour’s Lisa Nandy were similarly critical. More progressive commentators also believe the withdrawal marks a crucial defeat for American power – though they don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. Ex-Guardian journalist David Hearst, for instance, who now writes for Middle East Eye, made the following claim: “…this defeat marks the beginning of the end of the western empire, as the dominant organising military and economic world order”. (August 17)

Are they right?

According to commentator Joseph Bosco (The Hill, September 21), Biden and Blinken’s “clear message”, has been that “unburdened by that ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan”, the US has freed itself to focus on China and Russia. In other words, its exit has made it stronger. But in the short term at least, the withdrawal from such a strategically important territory in Central Asia has weakened America’s hand and diminished its power. It posed far more of a threat to China and Russia when it had 130,000 US and NATO troops on their doorsteps than it does now, despite the terrorist threat to those countries from a disintegrating Afghanistan.

Also, the rushed and chaotic way in which America left damaged its reputation globally. The historian William Dalrymple said: “Few will now trust American or NATO promises and we have handed a major propaganda victory to our enemies everywhere” (The Daily Telegraph, August 17). The rushed retreat looked weak, and that impression has undermined the ability of the US to terrorise other countries, on which its power depends. That includes its puppet regimes around the world, as well as its NATO allies. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace put it clearly when he said that “a superpower that is also not prepared to stick at something isn’t probably a superpower either. It is certainly not a global force, it’s just a big power”. (The Guardian, September 2) The speed of the departure, which clearly dumbfounded America’s closest NATO allies, revealed its total disregard for them, calling into question Biden’s claim of a new multilateralist approach post-Trump.

AUTONOMY FROM THE US

The allied response has been clear – to arm themselves independently. German defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said that Europe should “get more autonomous” (The Daily Telegraph, September 2), a view echoed by the Christian Democratic Union MP Norbert Röttgen, once tipped as a potential German foreign minister, who said Germany had to be free to act independently, “Not only in cases where we agree with the USA, but also in cases of dissent. ... We will not be able to realise our goals if we are not able to secure them militarily”. (World Socialist Web Site, August 26) French president Macron made a similar point at the Baghdad conference of Middle Eastern countries on Iraq’s future, where he claimed a central role for French imperialism in the Middle East and Central Asia – with or without the US. The EU’s Josep Borrell – effectively the EU’s foreign minister – said that the botched retreat from Afghanistan showed the need for “strategic autonomy”, and called for an EU rapid-reaction force to fill the vacuum left by the US. The project to push the European Union as a military player isn’t new, but has been held back by eastern European countries who fear a German military resurgence and by Brexit which removed British military power from the bloc. Now, it has been given renewed momentum. Ursula Von der Leyen has called for the EU’s own military force to be independent of both the UN and NATO. Macron, meanwhile, refuses to accept what he calls a “bi-polar world made up of the US and China”. French defence minister Bruno Le Maire outlined EU ambitions more explicitly: “Europe has to become the number three super-power besides China and the United States” (euobserver, September 6).

NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg has, understandably, expressed worries about the emergence of a parallel military alliance outside US control, as reported in the right wing blog Breitbart. (October 5) So, one effect of America’s withdrawal is to boost those in Europe arguing for EU military autonomy. And to create deeper cracks within NATO – which have always been there but which are now spreading. This will make NATO unity against China harder to achieve in future. It’s no coincidence that the AUKUS deal between the US, UK and Australia – and the deliberate side-lining of America’s rival Pacific power within NATO, France – followed hard on the heels of the retreat from Afghanistan, when France, Britain and Germany were also side-lined. What we’re seeing is a re-arrangement of US foreign policy which will have global implications. AUKUS may eventually seek to supplant NATO as the vanguard alliance of hawkish western forces, in the light of French and German equivocation over China. But for some time to come, NATO will continue to serve as America’s main enforcer, with other alliances ensuring maximum flexibility and geographical reach.

A similar restructuring is happening in the Gulf. The Gulf States appeared to support the US’s departure from Afghanistan, hosting the talks in 2020 between the US and the Taliban, providing stopping off points for the evacuation, and welcoming the fleeing Afghan leader Ghani. But their unease has been clearly expressed by the media mouthpieces of the monarchist regimes. One Kuwaiti commentator warned: “Don’t count on the US any more, and don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. (Breaking Defense, August 27) Another commentator from the UAE, Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, said: “The world has entered the post Pax Americana phase and the Gulf Arab States have to be prepared for this”. (ibid) The Saudis, who were heavily involved for years in Afghanistan developing Al Qaeda, are particularly worried. Notably they were not one of the countries helping with the evacuations. Saudi columnist Safouq Al-Shammari has called for stronger regional military co-ordination, based on closer ties with Israel (Middle East Media Research Institute, August 24). And Saudi Arabia and the UAE are starting to break their almost 4-year-long deadlock with Qatar. The Saudis realised the limits of US protection when Yemeni Houthi drones and missiles attacked its oil industry with impunity earlier this year.

CONTINUED US INTERVENTION 

This shift away from failed conflicts by the US doesn’t mean that America is about to become peaceful – despite Biden’s promise of an end to the era of major US military operations to remake other countries. Rather, we’re seeing a move from boots-on-the-ground interventionism in a number of different theatres – an end to the Bush and Blair model, which has become deeply unpopular with the US public – towards conducting regional wars through proxies, as the US has been doing in Syria, along with the use of long-distance “over-the-horizon” drone attacks. The other mode of American warfare is of course economic strangulation, which has proved highly effective in Syria from the imperialist point of view.

Looking at economic warfare first, Afghanistan was already destroyed by the American and British occupation and by the corrupt government they kept in place. 72% of Afghans currently subsist on less than $1 a day and GDP per capita was just $508.81 in 2020. Meanwhile nearby countries like Nepal and Pakistan performed better economically. Living standards in Afghanistan fell under the occupation, maternal mortality rose as did inequality. Contrary to western propaganda on women’s education, girls received on average 1.9 years of schooling, much less than in Pakistan. The vast sums of western money were spent on creating the Afghan army and supplying it with weapons. As a result, Afghanistan is the poorest Asian nation, poorer even than devastated Haiti.

And its economy is now being destroyed even further. The US has blocked access to Afghanistan’s central bank’s assets of nearly $9.5bn. (Al-Jazeera, August 18) The money is locked up in the Federal Reserve in New York. The IMF has suspended $460 million in emergency reserves to Afghanistan. The World Bank has frozen $3 billion of ‘development aid’. The EU’s emergency pledge of €1 billion actually amounts to only a tenth of that sum in terms of the money that may, eventually, reach Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s central banker Ahmady tweeted in late August: “If the Taliban can’t gain access to the central bank’s reserves, this would help start a cycle in which the national currency will depreciate, and inflation will rise rapidly and worsen poverty. That’s going to hurt people’s living standards.” And Voice of America reported: “Afghan people are facing both an artificial and natural disaster [there’s a drought], rendering them unable to feed their families. The situation has all the hallmarks of a humanitarian catastrophe.” (August 14) Economic sanctions like these will further stimulate poppy production for opium, which was almost wiped out under the first Taliban regime and massively revived under the western occupation so that it currently provides at least a fifth of the country’s GDP. Sanctions will also foster the trade in weapons left behind by the US.

As for the American long-distance bombing campaign, it's already begun. US drones killed 10 civilians days after its retreat in revenge for the huge ISIS-K attack on Kabul airport. the US defense department's spokesman John Kirby has explicitly stated the US is not waiting for permission from the Taliban to conduct "future over-the-horizon counterterrorism strikes" (CNS News, September 29). Interestingly Pakistan has refused permission for US drone bases, as have all the former Soviet central Asian republics - so the Americans are using India, with the effect that India is isolating itself within the region in exchange for a close relationship with the US.

Alongside "over-the-horizon" bombing is the use of terrorist and warlord proxies to sow instability. While Trump's deal with the Taliban paved the way for their rapid, almost bloodless takeover, the US is at the same time building up rebel forces opposed to the Taliban. The UN Security Council estimated in a report (June 1) that there were around 8,000 - 10,000 terrorists operating in Afghanistan. Hezbollah reported that the US had used helicopters to move ISIS terrorists from Iraq to Afghanistan, to reinforce ISIS-K, who have since attacked several civilian targets. America and Britain are also supporting the rebels who fought in Panjshir, and who are now regrouping in Tajikistan. These include the National Resistance Front of Ahmad Massoud former vice-presidentAmrullah Saleh, and various former Afghan army officers and ministers. Meanwhile, at the same time, both the CIA director and MI6 have been to Kabul, establishing relations with the regime while also seeking to divide it internelly. The US has refused to reopen its embasy - instead, it will use recognition of the regime as leverage, and demand that its allies do the same.

CHINA THREATENED

One US military strategist, Colonel Ralph Peters, wrote after 9/11 that the US no longer needed to win wars, but to organise instability. The article’s title was, Stability: America’s enemy. (The US Army War College Quarterly, Winter 2001) This instability is designed to create a serious terrorist threat not only to Afghanistan itself but also to Russia and China. For instance, Russia’s close neighbour and ally Tajikistan could soon become drawn into a regional war if it plays host to Afghan opposition forces. China too fears instability – particularly the continued spread into its Uyghur population in Xinjiang of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, which has a significant presence in Afghanistan. This anti-China terrorist group was taken off the American terror list by Trump, and is still off it under Biden – a clear sign that it’s useful to the US. Terrorist attacks also threaten China’s $62 billion transport network in Pakistan – part of its Belt and Road Initiative – which will link Tajikistan, Xinjiang and Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea: nearly all of landlocked Afghanistan’s imports come in via Pakistan. The East Turkistan Islamic Movement along with the Pakistani Taliban (TPP) – a separate group from the Afghan Taliban – were responsible for a major bomb attack in July.

So, while commentators like Nigel Farage (Newsweek, August 18) argue that the US withdrawal has gifted China access to Afghanistan's huge mineral wealth worth an estimated $1-$3 trillion, and strengthen its Belt and Road Initiative, it's likey to be cautious about investing in such an unstable environment. Its major investment in copper mining near Kabul, for instance, has stalled for the time being.

Meanwhile, further potential instability comes from Turkey, whose ambitions have been boosted by the US retreat. Turkey has been running Kabul airport with Qatar, and kept its Afghan embassy open. According to Christina Lin, Times of Israel (July 1 2015), using Afghanistan as a foothold, it wants to gain control over a huge region of Turkic countries, including Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which border Afghanistan, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which border Xinjiang, and finally Xinjiang itself. Turkey’s historic support for Uyghur secession and separatist terrorism makes it a credible threat to regional peace.

Offering potential stability, by contrast, is the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), led by China. At its September conference the SCO, which includes all the regional powers, released a statement expressing the hope for an Afghanistan that is peaceful, democratic and unified, free of reliance on opium and free of terrorism. It’s not yet clear how far the Taliban will lean towards co-operation with the peace-oriented SCO, or whether its dealings with the warlike US will get in the way.

The trouble is, the Taliban regime is both reactionary and divided, having been ushered into power by the US as part of the counter-revolutionary forces reversing the gains made under the progressive, Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government. Promoted right up until 9/11 by the US and Pakistan to enforce order on the local warlords so that energy pipelines could be built, that first Taliban regime proved difficult to control, and after 9/11 it was replaced by the more compliant US puppet, Karzai. A fitful peace might have prevailed had the US, supported by Britain, Australia, Canada and others, not alienated the local population with its brutal repression and thousands of drone strikes that hit mostly villages. This gave the Taliban legitimacy as an anti-occupation force.

In conclusion, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan was part of a long-planned, bi-partisan US strategy to get out of an unwinnable and expensive conflict. Biden followed through on Trump’s 2020 deal in Doha, which in turn followed on from Obama’s Pivot to Asia. However, the unilateralist, hurried nature of its retreat, and above all the disastrous consequences of 20-year war there, have cost it dear in terms of reputational damage and distrust among its allies, the fallout from which is still happening. This will make America more, not less, dangerous in future. Instead of replacing “relentless war” with “relentless diplomacy” as Biden has promised, the withdrawal marks the start of a new dangerous period building up to war with China. The AUKUS deal, effectively giving Australia future nuclear capability under US control, is preparation for choking off the shipping lanes that are crucial for China’s fuel and trade. This has heated up the new Cold War several degrees. Britain’s aircraft carrier fleet and the US navy now have a permanent presence off China, each foray into the Taiwan Straits a dangerous provocation. With the Americas’ massive technological advantage over China, there is no prospect of it ceding its global pre-eminence for several decades to come. (Gholz and Sapolsky, Journal of Strategic Studies, 24 June 2021)

PRIORITIES FOR ACTION 

In terms of what we can do, first, we should support calls for the US, IMF and World Bank to give Afghanistan back its money - which is being held hostage like Venezuela's gold.

Second, we should highlight the hypocrisy of Britain's treatment od Afghan refugees who are being pushed back across the English Channel even as government and media warmongers are calling for permanent wars to continue - the wars that produced the refugees in the first place.

Third, we should focus more on peace, on standing against all wars of intervention, on opposing the new Cold War which is leading towards hot war with China – and no return of western forces to Afghanistan in future.

Finally, with the proclaimed end to America’s war on terror, we should demand the closure of Guantanamo. 220 Afghans – many of them tortured at the US Bagram airbase – were held there along with almost 600 others. 39 men are still imprisoned in Guantanamo, held without trial for 15 years or more.

 

 

Emmanuel Macron and EU unhappy with US actions Photo by Jeremy Barande

US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo meets with Taliban leaders Doha, Qatar 2020 pic by US Department of State

This will make America more, not less, dangerous